


Diamonds are Forever, But Watches Wind Down

by mackenziebutterschnapps (hannibalsbattlebot)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Backstory, Biting, Bottom Hannibal, Canon-Typical Violence, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Cancer, Mild Feminization, Mild canon divergence, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Games, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Past Violence, Polyamory, Porn With Plot, Sexual Content, Sugar Daddy, season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-03-30 14:57:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3941074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannibalsbattlebot/pseuds/mackenziebutterschnapps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU of the season one dinner party, where Will decides to attend instead of ducking out and gets to meet another important man in his therapist's life.</p><p>Jeffrey is the Sugar Daddy financing Hannibal's lifestyle. He doesn't seem to mind that Hannibal has taken an interest in Will Graham, and he isn't surprised Will is interested right back. He knows how irresistible Hannibal can be.</p><p>This is set vaguely in Season One, after Sorbet. Mild Canon Divergence. Season One events are more of vague suggestions.</p><p>New! (Final!) Chapter 14: So Sweet and So Cold<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Daddy's Home

**Author's Note:**

> "Daddy's Home" was supposed to be a one-shot, but I fell in love with Jeffrey and wanted to spend more time with him.  
> 

Will was uneasy and his unease made him feel very visible. All these relaxed people milling about, probably wondering why the guest of honor looked so sweaty. He thought briefly of getting really drunk on whatever was being passed around, but when he knew getting drunk made him feel overly warm. It was warm enough in the room as it was, with the blazing fire and the body heat. 

His host was busy, happily moving from one thing to another, checking this and that, mixing a Manhattan for the one guest who refused to touch the champagne. Hannibal tried to press a flute on Will but after a polite sip Will resigned himself to holding the glass like an awkward prop. At least his hands had something to do.

Finally, Hannibal was done with his fussing and started to take Will around the room make introductions. Will made small talk and when he felt the conversation begin to lag, Hannibal extricated them both and they moved on. The guests seemed to know the routine and waited their turn for an audience.

"I feel like I'm at a cattle auction," he said. "You leading me around with a ring in my nose."

"You think my guests are sizing you up like a cut of meat on the hoof?" He looked over at the opera soprano. "You may be right."

They had talked with about half the guests when the doorbell rang. 

"Excuse me," Hannibal said. Slight frown. No more guests had been expected.

Everyone went quiet, trying to look like they weren't straining to listen in on the conversation in the hall.

"Ringing the doorbell?" Hannibal said from the front hall. "Such a formality."

"I saw you had company," said the guest.

A man walked in the room ahead of Hannibal. An older gentleman, but tall and with good upright posture. There was something of a Sean Connery look in his close-clipped beard and silvery-gray hair.

"Jeffrey!" said the woman Will had been speaking to, the soprano.

"You didn't tell us Jeffrey was back in town," Mrs. Komeda said to Hannibal.

"I didn't know," he responded. "A pleasant surprise for all of us."

"I didn't mean to crash your party, but crash it I did and you'll all have to forgive me." He turned to Hannibal who had the man's coat over his arm. "Hang that up for me, and don't bother checking the pockets. Your present isn't in there. I will bestow that on you later."

"You are just in time for dinner, but now our table will be unbalanced."

"Can't be helped," he said, dismissively. "I'm sorry if I've upset your domestic harmony."

Hannibal refolded the coat over his arm and smoothed down the collar.

"Will you dress for dinner?" Hannibal asked.

"Is that your way of asking me to? I beg your indulgence. I'd rather circulate."

Will waited for Hannibal's cold stare, but he only clicked his tongue in slightly amused disapproval and left with the coat.

Will had the strange feeling that this was well-worn patter. With the little back-and-forth the room around him had relaxed. He couldn't figure it out.

"Where did you come from this time?" the soprano asked Jeffrey, who was sinking into an armchair.

"Shanghai," he said, and took the glass someone handed to him. "I was also in Tokyo but that's tapped out business-wise. I'm glad to be home. By the time I stepped off the plane today, I couldn't bear the thought of another night in a hotel room."

Back from hanging up the coat, Hannibal stood next to the newcomer's chair, leaning in to the side and draping his arm across the back. Jeffrey reached over his shoulder and patted Hannibal's hand without looking at him. Hannibal listened to him talk quietly, with a smile on his face.

Then Jeffrey made eye contact with Will, beckoning him out from behind the rest of the group with two crooked fingers.

"And who is this?" he turned to Mrs. Komeda. "Elaine, did you bring this breath of fresh air?"

"Not all of us are cradle-robbers, Jeffrey," she said archly, but playfully. "Although I would be happy to claim him, I came stag tonight. He's actually a friend of your Hannibal."

"This is Will Graham," Hannibal said. "We met through work. I've been doing some consulting for the FBI."

Usually people had the same stock reactions to hearing "FBI" like "That must be thrilling" or, more dark "Have you ever seen a dead body?" but Jeffrey turned to Hannibal instead.

"Consulting with the FBI? Keeping busy in my absence?"

"Not too busy."

"I'm pleased to meet you, Will" he said. "Any friend of Hannibal's, etcetera."

Will couldn't think of anything to say and was suddenly very regretful that he had agreed to come.

Mrs. Komeda leaned over to Will and half-whispered to him.  "Come outside with me for a smoke."

"I don't smoke," he whispered back.

"Then come out on the balcony with me so I don't yield to the call of the void and throw myself off."

 

Mrs. Komeda lit her cigarette and blew a plume of smoke before she spoke.

"Hannibal didn't tell you about Jeffrey. Don't deny it. You had the panicked look of a trapped mouse."

"It isn't any of my business," Will said.

"But it is! If you are close enough to throw a dinner party for, he ought to have told you about Jeffrey. Uncharacteristically rude of Hannibal. I'm sure he meant to."

"So are they…lovers?"

 She screwed up her face, her very red lipstick making her expression dramatic even in the light coming through the French doors.

"Jeffrey finances him."

"In what?"

"In general," she said. " In _exchange_...Wait. That makes it sound like prostitution. No."

She moved her bony, be-ringed hand in front of her face, waving away her words and the exhaled smoke.

"Jeffrey is more of a patron, and Hannibal is like a geisha. Valued for his class, education and talent and reimbursed for the investment.  Jeffrey bought the house, pays the lease on his car, gives him a clothing allowance and generous gifts. I wish I was as well kept. Hannibal got that watch last time Jeffrey returned from overseas. He couldn't be this well turned-out on a psychiatrist's paycheck."

Will had always thought it was family money, if he ever thought about it at all.

"Should you be telling me this?" Will asked.

"Its common knowledge," she said. "No harm in telling you what everybody already knows."

Will felt foolish and unsophisticated. Everyone else here knew about this arrangement and accepted it as normal. Hannibal had been making him feel so special, but he had just been a diversion until his patron came back into town. A pet project. For all Will knew, Hannibal and Jeffrey talked about him. Will wanted to leave but he knew how that would look--like he was a petulant child. Storming out would give everyone something to titter about, and it would confirm to everyone he was jealous. He wasn't. Why should he be?

Mrs. Komeda watched Will gather himself up and when he looked composed enough, she ground out her cigarette and took him back inside.

 

Will was quiet at dinner, but no but Mrs. Komeda noticed. He didn't think even Hannibal noticed.  Jeffrey was holding court, with Hannibal beaming at him, the angle of his head just shy of coquettish. Will didn't know what he was eating. He had gotten so used to Hannibal's running commentary on each course--each _ingredient_ of each course. Without being primed for what he was going to put in his mouth, everything tasted strange, unpleasantly unexpected flavors unfurling on his tongue.

When dinner was over, the group went back into the lounge for after-dinner drinks but Hannibal steered Will off into a small study, shutting the door firmly behind them.

"I'm sorry you were upstaged at your own dinner party. I didn't know Jeffrey was back. If it's any consolation, I intended to tell you tonight, after the guests left."

"An unconventional personal life to go with your unconventional therapy."

"I didn't keep this from you because I was ashamed, but I was concerned about your reaction. With reason, it seems."

"Don't apologize. I'm glad," It came out sounding more bitter than he intended, but he had been turning these words over all through dinner, honing them to sharpness. "It was the wake-up call I needed. Nothing could have made it clearer to me that I don't belong here with you, in this world. Everyone takes your financial arrangment in stride. Maybe that means I'm hopelessly provincial in my thinking, but trading sex—I'm sorry, companionship—for money and gifts is prostitution. I don't want to be any part of it."

"This is a mutually beneficial arrangement between two consenting adults. With all the horrors you have seen it’s the thought of this that you cannot bear?"

He was right. Will didn't care what people, in general, did in their private lives. In practice, he was having a hard time coming to terms with this. He had never seen Hannibal so fawning, obviously enjoying all the attention both he and Jeffrey were getting from their guests.

"I saw a side of you I didn't know existed," Will said. "It makes me wonder what else there is that I don't know about."

"You have been the recipient of nearly all of my attention recently and suddenly, the dynamic was turned on its head. I am the one being catered to and it's disorienting for you. I should have prepared you for it. That I apologize for, but not my relationship with Jeffrey."

"It isn't just that," he said. "You used Jeffrey's money to wine and dine me. You used Jeffrey's house to throw my dinner party. Do you know how that feels? It feels cheap."

"The house I cannot help. It is my home. But I never used Jeffrey's money. My money, that I earned, and keep in a separate account. That is what I spent on you. Always. To do anything else would be disrespectful to both of you." He hesitated. "It is unfortunate that it happened this way, tonight. Because now the gift I was planning to give you will be cast is a less charitable light."

Hannibal took a square box out of his pocket, but he clapped his other hand on top of it, holding on to it for a moment. He waited until he made eye contact with Will and held it as he spoke.

"I picked this out for you.  This is not a hand-me-down of a gift I've grown tired of. I chose this myself, with you in mind."

Will thought about rejecting it from a sense of pride alone, but his curiosity was stronger. He took the box.

Inside was a watch with a white face, almost art deco styling and a dark band. When he took it out of the box, he was surprised to find the band was a rubber cuff instead of a leather strap.

"It doesn't look fancy, but it is sturdy. Water-resistant.  It can take whatever abuse you heap on it, within reason."

Will wondered if it was bad taste to put it on right away, but decided he didn't care.  He looked at it on his wrist. He knew Hannibal had been telling the truth. This had been chosen for him and him alone.

As he admired his gift, Hannibal came over and kissed him on the top of the head.

"Now you will always know what time it is."


	2. After Tea and Cakes and Ices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the dinner guests leave, Hannibal and Jeffrey have some time alone to catch up with each other.

Hannibal's party was over sooner than usual, guests saying their goodbyes without lingering. Too genteel to actual wink and nudge, they still passed knowing glances to each other as they made their exits. Hannibal and Jeffrey would, of course, like some time alone after so much time apart.

Jeffrey sighed with relief as the door closed behind the last few departing guests. He liked to entertain. He liked to watch Hannibal entertain, but after his long absence he had been looking forward to a quiet evening, which, even late as it was, they could still have.

They both cast looks around at the half-empty glasses on tables, the mild disarray of the room.

"There isn't too much to do," Jeffrey said.

"Help me bring this into the kitchen," Hannibal said.

They loaded two trays with the glasses, the napkins, the tiny plates with their crumbs and discarded toothpicks, and put them on the kitchen counter. Corralled in one place, the mess didn't look so bad.

"I can live with that until tomorrow," Jeffrey said.

"Mmm." Hannibal leaned on the counter, as if sizing up the job in front of him. Jeffrey came up behind him and hooked his head over Hannibal's shoulder and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

"Leave it," he said, and wrapped his arms around his chest. Hannibal said nothing but leaned back into the embrace.

"You must be tired from your long trip," Hannibal said, touching the forearms crossed in front of him.

"Not so tired."

Another kiss, not as quick, lower on Hannibal's neck.

"I wasn't expecting you. It’s a pleasant surprise to have your company tonight."

"I was trying to surprise you. I don't often get a chance to take you off guard." Jeffrey's hands were now under Hannibal's suit jacket, gripping him above both hips. "Speaking of being taken off guard, were you planning on telling me about your new little friend? That angel-faced jailbait pretending to be a cop?"

Hannibal took a dishtowel from the counter, shook it out and refolded it. "I was going to tell you, eventually, but I didn't anticipate this meeting to happen now. I didn't tell either of you about the other. As it is, I have more explaining to do to him. At least you are clear on the parameters of a relationship like ours."

 Hannibal pushed away from the counter, sliding away from Jeffrey.

"You'll have to excuse me. You might not be tired, but I've been working on this party all day."

"All right," Jeffrey said sourly. "I see."

"I still want you to visit me tonight. I'm asking for only a slight delay while I freshen up," he said. "Give me twenty minutes and then come see me in my room. We can talk some more then if you'd like."

 

Jeffrey gave him ten minutes head start, and then followed after him.

 

Hannibal was soaking in the tub,  head back, eyes closed.  "You're early," he said. "I haven't even washed my hair yet."

Jeffrey took the hint. He rolled up his sleeves and found the shampoo.  They quietly enjoyed the experience: Jeffrey washing Hannibal's hair, lightly using his fingernails on his scalp. Hannibal used moments like this a mental exercise, blocking out the stimuli from the rest of his body, concentrating on one part of his body.

"Rinse," Jeffrey said and Hannibal ducked under the water, emerging head and shoulders as sleek as a seal. "While you're in there, can I show you your gift? One of them, at least."

Jeffrey left the room for a moment and when he returned he held up a pair of brown leather gloves.

"Driving gloves?" Hannibal leaned back and closed his eyes again, disinterested. "I have driving gloves. Very nice ones."

"I know. I got them for you." Jeffrey turned and brought the entire box out, tipped it carefully so Hannibal could see but not far enough to dump them in the bathwater. "But do you have a dozen identical pairs of driving gloves? This way if one of the pair should get torn or soiled, you could get just throw it away, or burn it, and no one would know the difference."

"That is very thoughtful of you, Jeffrey, thank you."

Jeffrey smiled broadly. "Your other gift, I couldn't bring with me."

 "Why is that?" Hannibal asked with a small smile of his own.

"It's a cabin in the hinterlands of Montana, bought through shell companies and friends of friends and untraceable to either of us."

"What's in Montana?"

"Nothing."

Hannibal sunk down lower in the water. He let the tips of his toes peek up out the bubbles.

"After all this time, you know what I like," he said, but then said nothing more.

Hannibal was being unusually quiet.  It made Jeffrey worry what he was thinking about.

Jeffrey dipped his hand into the bathwater, lightly stirring the surface. "Should I leave you alone to soak?"

"No. I'm nearly finished. Could you get me a towel?"

Hannibal pulled the chain to release the stopper and stood, water streaming off his shoulders, down the indented curve of his spine.  He stepped out of the emptying tub and stood perfectly still and patient as Jeffrey toweled him off. Although Jeffrey made a thorough job of it, he made sure skin did not touch skin, keeping the soft cotton a barrier.  Jeffrey took a corner of the towel along a damp track Hannibal's dripping hair had made down his temple, cheek, jaw, collarbone. If he had to follow every drop's path, he would. Head to toes.

Hannibal pulled at the towel and Jeffrey let it slip through his fingers to the floor.

Hannibal pressed his damp body against Jeffrey's clothed body. They kissed, first sweetly and then less so. Hannibal hooked one finger in the buckle loop of his belt and pulled it free.

"Not here, in the bathroom, " Jeffrey said. "I want you in that big beautiful bed. That's where I picture you when I'm away."

Jeffrey did picture him there it was true, but he pictured Hannibal everywhere, in every state of dress and undress.

Jeffrey let him go into the bedroom and gave him a moment to arrange himself in bed. And it would be an arrangement. Hannibal had the ability to observe himself from the outside and to make the minor adjustments to present the best picture. Jeffrey had no doubt he would look as though he had just collapsed into bed, but how much of skin was covered or revealed was calculated down to the last inch. Jeffrey knew it but that didn’t take any of the enjoyment away. If anything, he appreciated the effort that went into the performance that only he would see.

 Jeffrey needed that moment too. His heart beat hard in his chest. It still felt a little dangerous to let his guard down with Hannibal. It was what he imagined lion tamers felt when they walked into the cage. The best lion tamers, the one who kept all their limbs, never became totally at ease with the animals.

Jeffrey walked into the bedroom and undressed, folding his clothes over the arm of the chair. Not that Hannibal would ever say anything about it, but this was his bedroom and Jeffrey acted with respect to his space. Jeffrey had his own bedroom across the hall. He slept in it more than people might think. They were set in their ways. They enjoyed each other's company, but were both used to privacy. Jeffrey visited this room with the full knowledge that he was an invited guest.

Hannibal had many protective layers around him, and every layer required an invitation all the way down. Into his home, his room, his bed, his arms. Rather than feeling offended that he had to jump through these hoops, Jeffrey felt honored when he passed a checkpoint that kept other people out. _Most people. Not all_.

Jeffrey got under the sheet and he was next to Hannibal. He had seen Hannibal naked only moments ago, but that did not diminish his delight at finding him here, naked, fragrant, soft and perfumed. Jeffrey pulled him closer and kissed him, and Jeffrey remembered a hundred other kisses that had started whole passionate nights. He and Hannibal had the luxury of a sea of memories to pick and choose from. Missteps, unsatisfying endings, frustrating interruptions, dates not kept—these were forgotten. What he remembered were the homecomings like this, just the sweetness.

Whatever fatigue Hannibal might have had no longer showed. He got on top of Jeffrey, his skin cool against him. Jeffrey wanted to run his hands over every inch of that skin, but Hannibal used his hands to guide Jeffrey's away, pinning both his hands down on the mattress on either side of his head, only releasing him when his mouth moved lower. He was sinuous as he slid his body down the length of Jeffrey's, just barely brushing his chest and stomach with his lips and, and just once, teasingly, with the tip of his tongue.

 Jeffrey peeled back the sheet, gasping at the rush of cold air and the feeling of the warm mouth enveloping him.  He wanted to watch, although he kept closing his eyes against his will as his back arched, hips thrusting up. Hannibal's face was both serene and focused. Jeffrey wanted to touch but he grasped the bed instead, not wanted to risk interrupting the man who was bringing him such pleasure.

Jeffrey came, hands clutching the sheets to either side of him.

Afterwards Jeffrey was slow, bathed in golden warmness. He didn't need that hormonal drive to want to bring Hannibal pleasure. He could enjoy his partner's mounting pleasure from the slight distance that his own satiety gave him. He preferred it this way. The haze of immediate lust had lifted and he could enjoy Hannibal's moans of pleasure as he took him into his mouth. Jeffrey could concentrate on what he knew Hannibal liked, making him ache with anticipation. He could make him wait until he said Jeffrey's name. He did as he came, hands gripped in Jeffrey's hair.

 

When Hannibal reached over to check the bedside alarm that he rarely needed but set faithfully, it was the slight distraction Jeffrey was waiting for.

"You cop friend…"

"Do you want to talk about him now?"

"He seems sweet," Jeffrey said diplomatically.

Hannibal laid back down, smoothed the sheets around him deliberately.

"He isn't. Tonight he was uncomfortable and that makes him withdraw in silence. When he does open his mouth he is either astonishingly brilliant or unbelievably rude."

"And you tolerate it?"

"I enjoy his company," Hannibal said. "I find him fascinating and I had all but given up on encountering anyone new who would pique my interest. He is a personal friend, a colleague. He is a brilliant profiler, the perfect blend of intelligent and intuitive. "

"You sound smitten," Jeffrey said.

Hannibal liked the lilting sound of it, and the divine and violent undertones. One had to experience a smiting to be smitten.

"He is also quite ill," Hannibal continued.

"It's nothing serious, I hope."

"It may be."

"Nice of him to come out tonight, then," Jeffrey said.

"He doesn't know it yet."

Jeffrey's expression was serious. Hannibal could hear it in his voice.

"Hannibal, what are your intentions with him?"

"Entirely honorable."

"According to your code."

"Yes," Hannibal said with a chuckle. _What other code would matter?_

Jeffrey found Hannibal's hand in the dark and held it. "If this is another one of your projects, I worry that you are overextending yourself. If he's smart enough to interest you then he's smart enough to be dangerous."

"His illness makes him easier to manage," Hannibal said. "I'm in control of the situation, Jeffrey."

Hannibal could so effortlessly could follow Jeffrey's thoughts. Jeffrey worried that, despite his assurances, Hannibal would let curiosity get in the way of caution. Jeffrey sent him messages all the time, consciously or unconsciously, and he could communicate back with him in their personal shorthand. So much passed between them with just a look, or the choice of one word over another.

This process had taken years with Jeffrey, but Will was catching on to Hannibal with a pace that was breathtaking. If he and Will could accomplish in months what had taken him and Jeffrey years, where could he and Will be in a decade? Either incandescent and sublime, he thought, or a burned out, ruined landscape.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from a line from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 
> 
> And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!  
> Smoothed by long fingers,  
> Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,  
> Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.  
> Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,  
> Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?


	3. Gamin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeffrey reminisces about his past with Hannibal--their first meeting and their second first meeting.

Hannibal was Jeffrey's alarm the next morning, waking him up when he came back into the room to get dressed. He had slipped out of bed without Jeffrey, who was usually such a light sleeper in the morning, even noticing.

Jeffrey put one foot down on the cold floor.

"Can I borrow a pair of socks?" he asked. His suitcase was in the car and the rest of his clothes were across the hall.

Hannibal was holding his own socks, but he gave them to Jeffrey, tossing them over with a soft underhand that landed neatly beside him.

Pulling on these borrowed socks reminded Jeffrey of the first night he and Hannibal spent together. Not the night they acknowledged as their first, but the one they didn't talk about.  Not the one in Baltimore, the one in Paris.

Jeffrey had been left on his own during a business trip. He was only in middle management back then, so when plans had changed, no one really thought to notify him. This was before cellphones, so Jeffrey sat in the restaurant alone for an hour before he wandered out alone into the street. It was a beautiful night so he went out, up one street down another. He had an infallible sense of direction and didn't worry about being lost. He liked to explore. Being stood up or disinvited to the meeting was a blessing. He now had a whole evening to himself in Paris with no plans and no responsibilities. He went into a café to eat, and then a bar. In this nameless bar, he met the man he would think of for many years simply as Gamin.

He was sitting at the bar, one foot on the floor as if he was ready to leave at any moment. Other than that, he looked at ease, sharp profile wreathed in smoke. He turned towards the opening door and back, speaking when he was facing away from Jeffrey again.

"Who are you looking for?"  he asked.

 He spoke heavily accented French, and it was hard for Jeffrey to understand. Jeffrey sat down with one stool between him and the stranger.

"No one," Jeffrey said. "I'm just taking a walk."

Although he couldn't pin down the man's accent, he picked up on Jeffrey's and slid seamlessly into heavily accented English. "Alone? Looking for trouble?"

He wasn't sure if it was an accusation or an offer.

"Buy me a drink," the man said.

"Like hell I will," Jeffrey said.

"Don't be an asshole," he said. "You can afford it. You could buy this whole bar and everything in it. C'mon. Show some goodwill to a poor _gamin_."

The air of menace around the man lifted just a little and Jeffrey smiled. He signaled the bartender. _Deux s'il vous plait._

"How do you know I can afford it?" Jeffrey asked as the bartender put their beers in front of them.

"Your suit costs more than my year's rent."

"So either I have a very good taste or you live in a bad neighborhood."

"Both are true," he said. "I do live in a shithole. It's why I'm here. It's not for the fucking atmosphere."

Jeffrey bought him that drink and then another. He didn't know the other man's name, was afraid to ask his age, and didn't know where he came from except it wasn't from Paris. He smoked non-stop, more than average in a country where it seemed like everyone smoked. It went well with Gamin, his foul mouth, his nonchalance, the small diamond stud in his ear. Jeffrey didn't remember Gamin asking him to come with him when he left the bar, but when he stood, Jeffrey followed. Jeffrey followed all the way to Gamin's rundown hovel, tongue-tied.

 

Across the city, Jeffrey's wakeup call rang in his empty hotel room. In Gamin's room, Jeffrey slept on. He woke up just in time to be late to his morning meeting. He had no good excuse. He couldn't tell them  he was late to the meeting because he was up late the night before licking the salt off a Frenchman's taught stomach.

Jeffrey had not meticulous about folding up his clothes the night before, and he could find everything but his socks. He could go to the meeting in yesterday's suit, but he didn't want to show up without socks. It was unprofessional.

"I hate to ask," he said to the man on the bed, "but can I borrow a pair of socks?"

"Why do you hate to ask?"

Gamin sat in bed leaning on one unraised knee, smoking and watching him from under hooded eyes.

"Seems very intimate to be wearing another man's socks."

"I had your dick in my ass, why would I mind your feet in my socks?"

He had a point.

"You smoke too much," Jeffrey said. "You need less cigarettes and to eat a good meal."

"I need a good bottle of wine." Gamin placed the nub of his cigarette in the chipped saucer that stood in for an ashtray. "I need you to come back to bed, alright?"

Jeffrey protested weakly, but did what they both knew he would: run down to the lobby where the phone was, call to reschedule his meeting claiming sudden illness, and then return to the room where he spent the better part of the morning enjoying the prowess of Gamin's talented mouth.

When he could finally tear himself away, the sun was setting. He pulled on the borrowed socks and this time Gamin did not ask him to stay longer.

Jeffrey took out one of his business cards and wrote on the back.  "This is my hotel and my room number. I'll leave you a key. I have to take a short trip out of town and I'll be gone two nights. You are welcome to stay in my room. Order room service. Food. Wine, too, but food."

Gamin took the card looked at both sides.

"Yeah," he said. "I'll think about it."

 

When Jeffrey came back to the hotel room two days later, he saw the traces Gamin had left behind. There was a hint of cigarette smoke in the air, an empty wine bottle on the nightstand. Jeffrey's missing socks had been found and were left in plain sight on the dresser, clean and folded together. The towel in the bathroom was still wet, but Gamin was gone.

That was it, the last of this mysterious stranger. Jeffrey imagined running into him on the street when he had business in Paris, but it was a million to one chance and Jeffrey never did. He hoped that Gamin might contact him. Then Jeffrey changed jobs and the information on the business card was obsolete. The slim chance that Gamin might call him out of the blue disappeared and Jeffrey put it out of his head.

He did not think they would meet years later in a hospital in Baltimore when Jeffrey thought he'd broken his wrist.

 

He was in town with his mistress at the time and he fell misjudging a step. She dropped him off at the emergency room and left. Their bond did not include in sickness and in health. The doctor on duty diagnosed it as a sprain, and wrote a prescription for a wrist brace. Jeffrey was on his way to the receptionist, when he saw a man in the hall that he thought he recognized.

Jeffrey knew he looked familiar but he couldn't place him at first. Perhaps they had met socially. They both looked at each other and slowed their walk. There was an awkward moment where they both tried to work out who the other was.

"I'm sorry. Do we know each other?" the other man asked.

It was the voice that stirred the memory: heavily accented English. Then Jeffrey wondered how he could have forgotten. He was older, and the accessories were different, but the eyes and mouth were still the same. He felt flush. Gamin, all grown up. He had walked out of the mists of Jeffrey's fondest memory and appeared in a sickly-lit hospital hallway in Baltimore. He not only had a real name, but a name tag.

"Maybe," Jeffrey said extending his hand "Jeffrey Coulton."

The other man's warm, dry hand clasped his. "Hannibal Lecter," he said.

Jeffrey had heard the name before, but they had never met face to face. Jeffrey hadn't been overly eager to make his acquaintance on reputation alone. Hannibal was new to the Baltimore social scene, making a name for himself as a hot shot psychiatrist. Elaine Komeda even insisted, hanging on Jeffrey's arm "You must meet Hannibal. You would just _love_ him."

Jeffrey disliked the man on principle. He hated having his mind made up for him. He thought from what he heard second hand that this Dr. Lecter sounded like a pretentious asshole.

Now, Jeffrey didn't know what to think or what to say. He wanted to ask "Do you remember me?" but he was afraid the answer would be no. It should have occurred to him long ago, but it only came to him now: Gamin was special to Jeffrey, but he didn't know that the feeling ran both ways. There had only been one Gamin for Jeffrey, but had there only been one Jeffrey for Gamin?

"We should catch up," the doctor said and, to Jeffrey's great pain, checked his watch. "Why don't you check out with the receptionist and come back here?"

"Come back? Why?"

"Because once you turn in this paper you will no longer be a patient of this hospital and it won't be unethical for me to take you to dinner."

 

This was their official meeting. This was the story they smugly told at parties. One of Hannibal's patients had been taken the emergency room; Jeffrey was there for his wrist. They met in the hallway. There was a spark, the doctor was forward, and the rest was history. This is what they told people. It was part of the sanitized story they told that made people smile, but didn't take into account Jeffrey's dreamy longing or the dimple in the doctor's earlobe where a diamond stud had once been.

They didn't tell (although they sometimes hinted when enough alcohol had been passed around and the party became bawdy enough) that they slept together that first night. Instead of trying to recreate the exertion of their distant Paris night, Hannibal just sighed and said wistfully "ah, I'm not as young as I once was."  It was true Hannibal had lost that languid ranginess of youth, but he had filled out. Under his clothes, he was strong and lean. But his acknowledgement that time had passed for both of them put Jeffrey at ease about the places on his body that had gone slack, the gray at his temples, the pinch of loose skin under his jaw. 

They had gone back to Jeffrey's house after dinner. It was the house he would eventually sign over to Hannibal, although Jeffrey considered it was Hannibal's to take or leave the moment he crossed the threshold.

 


	4. There Will Be Time For You...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will struggles with the implications of Hannibal's gift to him and decides to return it. The events of Fromage make him reconsider his reconsidering

Will was nearly late for his appointment, which was ironic because mostly what he was doing that afternoon was looking at a watch. He left it in his desk and got almost to his car before he turned around and retrieved it. He put it on and looked at it as he drove, then worried about getting it dirty and wrestled it off at a red light.

He nearly shook it in Hannibal's face as he walked in, launching right into his speech, barely allowing time for a greeting. "I don't understand this language of gifts and benefactors."  He paced, hands on hips, the position both protective and defensive, like he was holding himself together with both hands while fending off the world with outward-jutting elbows. "It has an old world flavor, as outmoded as carrier pigeons or communicating through the colors of roses in a bouquet or the way you hold your fan at the dance." The metal casing made a small click on the glass tabletop as he set it down. He crossed his arms and stepped back. "I can't keep this until I know what it means."

Hannibal sat down, hoping Will would follow his lead. "It means you can tell the time."

Will scrunched up his face in a way Hannibal could tell was meant to look angry. "Don't patronize me. Give me that much consideration."

Hannibal's annoyance showed not in his voice or expression, but by his next verbal volley. "The language of flowers and fans were useful in a society that was less open about relationships and courting. It also served as a marker of inclusion or exclusion. If you didn't know the language you wouldn't even know a conversation was going on around you. Are you too accustomed to your status as an outsider to contemplate being an insider?"

"This is not about my general alienation from my fellow man. This is about my relationship with one man" he shrugged to make his next words sound casual, "or possibly two."

"My relationship with Jeffrey has nothing to do with our relationship, unless that is something you would like to explore."

"Oh, no," Will said. "That particular association came from you. This is not in my head, doctor. You made that link."

"How so?"

"You give me the same gift Jeffrey gave you when the last time he came back from Europe."

Hannibal appeared to consider this for a moment. "Men are difficult to shop for, you don't wear French cuffs…" he waited a moment for a possible correction on this point.

"So no cufflinks."

"I doubt you would have appreciated or accepted a pearl necklace or a pair of diamond earrings."

"Very funny."

"I am guilty," Hannibal said "only of being unoriginal."

This got the smallest smile.

"Does Jeffrey know you're cribbing pages from his playbook?"

Hannibal spread his hands. "That information would fall under the inner workings of our relationship. Would you like to talk about my relationship with Jeffrey?"

"No."

"You've mentioned him twice."

Will stopped pacing. "Well, maybe if I could understand that dynamic, I could understand what you are asking of me. What are the implications of this gift, or any gift? What are the strings?"

"Interesting that you leap straight from meaning to obligation. What are the implications as you see them?"

Will gritted his teeth, biting back his annoyance at questions being answered with questions.

 "That you want me as something more than a friend or patient."

Hannibal nodded.

"I don't want to be _kept_ ," Will said. "I'm not…" he tried to think of something that wasn't insulting. "like you. I'm not going to be the next rung down on the ladder. Should I start looking for some 20-year old to be my kept man? Do I need to keep the tradition going? Is that the inherent obligation?"

"You think I'm trying to establish a similar relationship with you as I have with Jeffrey, only in this scenario I'm Jeffrey and you're me? I didn't intend you to draw that parallel."

Will made a motion by his head like something unraveling from inside it. "I make this intuitive leaps, weirdest thing."

"In this case, your leap has lead you astray," Hannibal said. "Yes, Jeffrey gave me a watch and I gave you a watch but the meanings are very different. I received a watch because I have a fondness for them.  By giving me an expensive gift, Jeffrey was showing he knows my tastes and intends to continue supporting me financially so I can maintain a certain standard of living.

"I saw this watch and thought of you. It is simple in appearance, but durable and of good quality, features that I thought would be important to you. It was my hope that when you needed to check the time you would think of me. The watch would be a physical reminder of my emotional care."

Will looked at it, wavering, but shook his head. "You can still give me care as a friend, and as a doctor. Its normal for a doctor to have many patients or a person to have a group of friends. This—isn't normal."

"It isn't usual."

"I want normal."

"Do you?"

Will wanted to want normal, and out of reflex, he clamped down on anything out of the mainstream. He worked very hard to convince the people around him that he was normal and boring and therefore trustworthy and non-threatening. He was afraid if he allowed one concession, the whole rickety support of normalcy he had patched together over the years would totally collapse.

"I just can't," he said, and left the office, cutting off the conversation as abruptly as he had started it.

Walking out, he didn't know if he had been brave or a coward. He tried to shake off the feeling, putting it in the mental file "Things to Think About Later." For now, he still had a tip from Hannibal's patient to follow up on. Tobias Budge. Work would, for once, be a welcome distraction.

 

Will hoped he misheard Jack. His ears were still ringing. Tobias Budge had been "located," not apprehended. There was an incident with fatalities at Dr. Lecter's office. Jack's mouth made some noises about Will going to the hospital which he shrugged off without responding to. Will's heartbeat was loud and clogged his remaining hearing with its instant thumping.

"If you won't go to the hospital, at least let me drive," Jack half-ordered.

Will sat, a passenger in his own car.  Strange sounds were swimming in and out of his range of hearing.  It also gave his own thoughts an almost audible aspect, like a metallic echo chamber.

_Dead. Hannibal is dead because you you didn't kill Budge. You didn't even stop him you just made him angry and he killed Hannibal. He's lying dead on the floor because what chance would he have against a pissed off killer like Budge? Is this what you wanted? You understand hurt loss and sadness and thousand ways a killer can unleash his pain on the innocent but you cannot understand, and accept, a simple gift of love?_

The building, which always looked so stately and serene when Will showed up for his evening appointments, was crawling with police and crime scene techs. It looked like a violation.

"Will, are you alright?"

"I've got to work the scene," he said, lurching out of the passenger's seat too quickly and feeling dizzy. He put his hand on the hood of the car and took a few deep breaths. "You'll have to clear everyone out." He could at leave have one private moment. It would be both his solace and punishment to look down at Hannibal's broken body and feel the fear of his last moments of life.

Jack was having a conversation with one of the cops on the scene. Will could see they were talking, but he couldn't hear over the insistent buzzing in his ears. He could only hear when Jack turned back to face him.

"I don't need you. It's pretty clear cut," Jack said, although his face expressed doubt. "Budge killed his friend and then turned on Dr. Lecter."

"Is he in custody?"

Jack looked at him with curiosity. "Do you think that's necessary? That isn't rhetorical, Will. Are you getting a different read on the situation? Say the word and we'll take him in. You know him better than I do."

"I wouldn't say that I know him, beyond his crimes."

"Are you talking about Budge? Budge is dead, Will. Dr. Lecter killed him…in self-defense."

"Hannibal is alive?"

"Beat up, sure, but he's the last man standing."

 

Will kept himself from running into the office. He had gotten a second chance, but he needed to see for himself.

He had been so busy worrying about Hannibal pulling him with a silken cord into his polished and brassy-bright world, that he didn't stop to think that the pulling worked both ways. Will had been pulling Hannibal into his world with ropes made of Hannibal's own affection for him. Every obligation Hannibal felt towards him as a friend, counselor, possible lover was another loop around him. Will had been too busy fretting about that watch to consider the other side. He failed, ironically, to see the situation from someone else's point of view.

Hannibal was sitting at the desk, head bowed, but he looked up when Will entered and smiled with bloodied lips.

Will stumbled through an apology, managing to tamp down the impulse to wipe away the blood he saw on Hannibal's face. He wanted to erase the signs of his own failure and callousness.

"Let me drive you home." He was filled with the warmth of disaster averted and someone lost being restored. "Unless…unless you would rather have Jeffrey come pick you up. I'm sure he will be worried to death about you." _Like I was._

"Unfortunately Jeffrey's not in town. He left this morning. But you can still bring me home. I would appreciate it."

In the car on the way home, Hannibal stared out the window. Will couldn't read his silence. He thought of a few things ways to start a conversation, but none of them were quite right. It would be selfish to make this about him and his feelings,but he wanted to make sure Hannibal knew how happy he was to see him again. He turned on the radio, punched the button for the station that played classical music in the evenings, but thought that was a transparent and pathetic attempt to pander to his passenger, so he turned it off again. Hannibal raised a hand.

"Leave it on," he said. "If you don't mind."

Will turned it back on, grateful that it filled the silence in the car. He made himself relax his grip on the steering wheel. He was already wound up and his own churning thoughts were not helping.

 _You are a caring friend_ , he told himself. _What would a friend do for a friend in this situation?_

It scared him a little that he had to think so hard about what a normal reaction would be.

_This is what you will do: you will walk him to the door. You will make sure he gets in safely. If he asks you if you want to go in, go in. Settle him down with whatever he would need for the night and then tell him he can call if he needs anything. Then you get to go home. No mixed messages and no one gets hurt._

Usually picturing himself back at home, the reward for getting through whatever gore he had to wallow through in a single day, was intensely relaxing. It gave Will a finish line for the day. But when he tried to mentally place himself back in his house now, there was no feeling of relief. He could easily imagine himself wandering from room to room, picking up the phone, putting it down and then finally giving in and looking for his car keys to make the long drive back to Baltimore.

_This is what you will do: you will go in the house. You will offer to stay.  If he says no, you will trust that he knows himself well enough to know that he doesn't need any company. You will very convincingly and sincerely offer to pick up the phone at any time if he calls. You will call to check on him in the morning._

His passenger touched his nose with the pads of his fingers, gently feeling the stability of the cartilage and bone underneath.

"Are you sure you don't want to go to the hospital?"

"I'm certain, but thank you for your concern."

"What if you have a concussion?"

"I don't."

 _This is what you are going to do: you are going to make sure he wakes up in the morning, even if it means you have to sleep in your car and ring his doorbell at dawn_.

They pulled up in the driveway.

Will went around and opened the door and offered a hand up out of the passenger's seat, which Hannibal made use of only briefly.

"I would invite you in," Hannibal said and started to walk off toward the front door at a brisk pace, with Will following behind, "but I will save you from having to think of an excuse to refuse. We've both had a trying day and I for one lack the energy for pretense."

 "I wouldn't refuse," Will said.

Hannibal turned and looked at Will closely, weighing his honesty.

"Then, do come in," he said opening the front door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I took the title of this chapter from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
> 
> There will be time, there will be time  
> To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  
> There will be time to murder and create,  
> And time for all the works and days of hands  
> That lift and drop a question on your plate;  
> Time for you and time for me,  
> And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  
> And for a hundred visions and revisions,  
> Before the taking of a toast and tea.


	5. ...And Time for Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continuation of the events of chapter 4.   
> Hannibal narrowly escaped being killed by Tobias Budge. Will brings him back home and decides what he wants to do about his new perspective on their relationship.

Will walked into the dark front hallway of Hannibal's house. He made movements to turn on the lights, but didn't know where the switches were so he stood off to the side, with his hands in his pockets.

"What do you need? Food? Medicine? Should I call some—"

"No one to call, nothing to do," Hannibal said.

"I don't feel like I can just leave. I feel---"

Hannibal held up a hand and then said "Sit," firmly. Will was grateful to have an unambiguous direction to follow. He sat on the small bench there in the hallway. Hannibal sat next to him, leaning forward, the casual pose he used to deliver confidences. "We have both been through a similar trauma today and it is an appropriate reaction to want to bring this to someone who is both a counselor and a friend, but I'm afraid on this count I will have to let you down."

"What do you mean?"

"People who give care—therapists, doctors, even parents of small children—need to care for themselves first, so they have the internal resources to give care. At this moment, I have no reserves to draw on. I want to give you emotional support, but I'm human, subject to the same human limitations as anyone else. I saw a patient of mine killed before my eyes and my own life was threatened." He looked down. Will couldn't tell if he was looking at the floor or his own hands. "I killed a man today. Because of that, I can't listen to your problems tonight. For that I'm sorry.  Tomorrow we can discuss your trauma if you still would like to, but not tonight. I have nothing to give you."

"I'm a cop. I'll be fine. I _am_ fine."

"You were attacked."

"It pales in comparison to what you went through."

"Pain is not a competition."

"Then I'll tell you about my own pain, and you don't have to say anything," Will said, slapping his palms down on the tops of his thighs. "Today I felt fear, the kind of fear that grabs your heart and lungs and squeezes like iron bands. I didn't feel it when I was fighting off Tobias Budge. I felt that fear when I heard there had been a fatal incident in your office and I didn't know if you were safe."

"Delayed reaction."

 Will shook his head. "I thought you were dead. I pulled up to your office expecting to work your crime scene. I almost lost you."

Hannibal waited for a moment. "Tell me, what did you almost lose? A friend?  A healthcare provider?"

Will was stung by the harshness of his words, although they were delivered in the same even tone he used for the most impersonal of questions. It took a moment to realize Hannibal was being entirely fair, considering how Will had left things between them.

"So you were worried on my behalf?" Hannibal continued. "You feel other people's emotions on a regular basis. What makes this any different than what the FBI pays you to do?"

"The difference is, I'm not trying to catch you," Will said. "I want to care for you, as people do for people who are important to them. You say you don't have anything to give me. That's fine. I don't need anything from you."

Hannibal sighed and his shoulders dropped incrementally.

"All I want is the comfort of your presence, if you can give it."

He put out his hand and Will took it. They sat wordlessly in the dark hallway. After a while, Hannibal leaned his head on Will's shoulder.

 

Will hated to sit still. He was a fidgeter, a pacer, someone who always needed to do something with his hands. When he was younger he had been a nail biter, until he got deeper into science and learned what kind of germs could linger on human hands. He was capable of stillness when he was at ease and that was usually when he was alone. Now he was still, seated on an uncomfortable bench, watching through the window as the sky went from inky blue to black.

He was thinking, but not the frantic cycling thoughts he had before. Those thoughts were like a mouse in a cage, running from wire wall to wire wall, and they had been the majority of his thoughts lately. He hadn't been able to think clearly about Hannibal for quite a while.

Will remembered with chagrin the gut punch he felt when Jeffrey came in the room during what was supposed to be his party. He had just barely eased himself into the idea of crossing that line of propriety with his not-quite-therapist and then a whole other issue was thrown at him. It felt like he was being asked to accept too much.

He told himself that he been scared off by the unusual relationship in Hannibal's life, because, dammit, he was trying to be normal. But, if he was truthful with himself, it was just that he had been insulted by the thought of being an addition, just another companion on rotation. Now, feeling the weight of the head on his shoulder, the fingers intertwined with his, Will knew it wouldn't be like that. He didn't have a name for it, but it didn't feel like infidelity. He had given up on the idea that he needed to fit this into the narrow definitions he was familiar with. What they could have was Something Else, as unique as the man himself.

Somewhere during these thoughts, Will went from thinking to listening. He moved his shoulder gently. Hannibal had fallen asleep.

"Hey. Hey. Wake up. You were sleeping."

"Wasn't."

"It's fine," he said in a voice slightly above a whisper.  "I'll take it as a compliment. You feel at ease around me. Its not something I'm used to. More often I make people feel uneasy."

"Then I should take as a compliment that you don't feel the need to elicit unease in me to keep me at arm's length."

"You know," Will said, "speaking of keeping people at a polite distance, if you want me to be something more than a friend or patient or coworker, you'll have to be this at ease with me. You should be able to nod off on the couch if you had a hard day and not have to worry about entertaining me. When I'm here, you shouldn't have to be a host."

"You view my form of entertaining as a distancing maneuver?"

"An overly-controlled demeanor can be as off-putting as a poorly-controlled one."

"You aren't poorly-controlled in your behavior, although you might like people to think you are."

"Appearances are deceiving. Sometimes very deliberately."

Hannibal sat up, and touched his bloody lip with a finger. "My mouth is bleeding again."

"Yeah. Yeah it is." Will cupped his jaw and ran his thumb lightly over the wound. "Does it hurt?"

"A bit." He paused. "Not as much as some of my other injuries, but I worry about this one the most. So visible. I'll have to stop seeing patients until it heals. It would be a distraction for them."

"Already thinking of other people? You are supposed to be renewing your own reserves."

Will got up and got a cloth from the kitchen, dampened it and brought it back. He brought it over and held it out, but Hannibal made no move to take it. Will dabbed at the blood and Hannibal closed his eyes. Will put his hand under his chin to keep him still. He was dabbing at the spot so gently it took several long moments to clean it.

"How is that?"

"Better. Thank you."

Will still had his hand under Hannibal's chin. He had reached out without thinking, and now he didn't want to draw his hand back. He planted a swift kiss on the unbloodied corner of Hannibal's mouth.

"Will, when people feel they have lost control of one part of their lives—"

Will put his mouth fully on his.

"—they will act impulsively just to feel a measure of control."

 "Or Sometimes people take the opportunity of a near-miss to reevaluate what--and who--is important to them." 

"I'm concerned if you make a decision in an emotionally vulnerable time--"

" Don't psychoanalyze me."

 

_Having him so close was like a feast. Instead of picking up traces of Will in the places he had been, Hannibal could smell him in his full complexity. First the hot sweetness of Will's illness, the sour sweat that had leached the  fear and adrenalin out of his body, then what Hannibal like to think of as Will's home smell, the mélange of his environment  that clung to his clothes. Underneath all of that, the musky smell of his arousal made the subtle base note._

 

They kissed again. Will unbuttoned Hannibal's jacket, just so he could feel the warmth of his chest under his hands. He wasn't intending to do more than feel the solidity of his ribcage and the thumping of his heart underneath. But he kept going, unbuttoning Hannibal's shirt and undoing his tie, savoring the whisper of silk pulling through silk. Will had a need to see him, not just feel him. Bruises were already developing under his skin.

(Later, he would hear from Jack how angry he was that no one got pictures of Hannibal's wounds, as evidence. Will held back from telling him that he had memorized and could probably describe each bruise and scrape in great detail, using his own hand for scale.)

When Will reached for the buckle of his belt, Hannibal stopped his hand. "I don't usually undress in my front hallway."

He stood and led with Will following behind, one hand on Hannibal's back. He didn't want to break contact. He was afraid if he did, he wouldn't have the nerve to reach out one more time.

Hannibal's bedroom had diffuse, soft light. Decorated to be masculine without being austere, fully fitting to the man who inhabited it.

Once inside the room, door closed behind them, Will finished stripping him down without reserve. Instead of returning the favor, Hannibal sat on the edge of the bed and watched Will take off his own clothes. Something that, on paper would have sounded like a level of hell--stripping while someone else openly watched him without politely averting their gaze, without, it seemed even _blinking_ \--was mitigated by the simple, entirely readable expression of desire on Hannibal's face. Readable to him; Will had learned the hieroglyphics of Hannibal's expressions.

Stripped to his skin, Will waited for the tipping point of the inevitable power shift when Hannibal decided to take him. He had peeked under enough seemingly calm surfaces to see the riot of animal impulses that are so often below. Still waters run deep. And, he thought, the stiller the water on top, the deeper the vortex underneath.

Instead, Hannibal pulled Will forward by the waist, then pressed his ear to his stomach, as if listening to the inner workings. Will was used to people trying to hear the music in the machinery as his mental gears clicked, but who wanted to listen to the clicks and pops of his joints or the thrum of blood in his veins?  Hannibal put one hand on Will's stomach, fingers spread.

_He had gotten to see, smell and feel. He wanted to hear, and hopefully, to taste._

Will put his hand on Hannibal's shoulders and that seemed to break the spell. Still holding on to Will's waist, Hannibal leaned back on the bed, gently pulling Will on top of him.

Will kissed him while he straddled him, and he was aware of the points where they touched physically—mouth to mouth, Hannibal's skin under the press of Will's palm, the light touches of Hannibal's fingers on each side of his waist. Their points of contact were like a match put to his skin. Hannibal's had one hand on each of Will's hips, pulling him forward to inch up, until he could take Will's cock in his mouth. There just was enough space between the headboard and the wall for Will's fingers to hold on. Will wasn't sure he should move until the hands on his hip pulled him forward and back, guiding him in the small strokes that sent him slowly gliding in and out. He could have come in moments, but he was guided back before that happened with the same firm hands on his hips.

Will kissed Hannibal's lips and his neck, trailing down his chest. Light kisses where the flesh was bruised or scraped. The wound on Hannibal's thigh had been dressed by the paramedics, but Will symbolically grazed the white square of gauze with his lips. All the while he had been traveling up and down the landscape he had been occasionally brushing against, but not directly touching Hannibal's erection. All at once he put his mouth over it, his hand firmly grasping the length he couldn't take.

"I want you inside me," Hannibal said.

He told him where the lube and condoms were. Will slid one hand up and down the shaft and with the other worked two slick fingers in his hole. He worked his cock in slowly and gently. Even through the thin film of latex he could feel himself gripped tightly.

Hannibal squeezed the sides of Will's body with his thighs, raising his hips up to meet him. Will thrust in to his full length. The cry Hannibal made would have alarmed him if not followed by a "Yes do it again, yes."  So he did, biting his lip, chin tucked down to his chest.

"Will," Hannibal said in the commanding tone Will had been expecting all along. "Look at me, Will. Feel me, but look me in the eyes."

Will raised his head and looked into Hannibal's eyes. He saw, or thought he saw, someone as lonely as himself, a bottomless well of need. He had seen these brown eyes go cold as ice, hard as tiger quartz. But now he thought he saw something else, whatever that hard carapace was protecting. He saw…

He couldn't think. He could see and feel, but not put it together. He was all a single nerve and that nerve was electric.

He wrapped his still-slick hand around Hannibal's cock and matching the rhythm of his thrusting. Will came with a wordless moan, arching his back. He collapsed, his head hung low and resting on Hannibal's shoulder.

"Look at me."

Will pretended he hadn't heard, and lowered himself down to take Hannibal's cock in his mouth again.  Will felt a small knot of shame. Hannibal was the one person he could never fool into thinking an orgasm was true intimacy. He had wanted the connection of staring into Will's eyes while he came and Will couldn't do that. It was more personal and intimate than he could manage. 

Hannibal came into Will's mouth, not looking into his eyes as he wanted to but looking up at the ceiling, feeling simultaneously both intense physical pleasure and extreme disappointment.  

When Will heard the final sigh and knew he had swallowed every drop Hannibal had to give, he could finally raise his head. Hannibal pulled Will over to lay his head on his chest. The sheets were tangled around their feet.

He touched Will's hair lightly and made a disappointed _tsk_ sound. "Maybe next time."

Will looked at his own hand lying on Hannibal's chest. There would be a next time.

 

Hannibal had looked into Will's eyes and raised the curtain just a fraction. Will had pulled away from that intimacy, but he hadn't run away. He had seen a glimpse of what Hannibal wanted him to see and it did not totally repulse him. This is a very good thing, Hannibal thought as he stroked Will's hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I took the title of this chapter from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
> 
> There will be time, there will be time  
> To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  
> There will be time to murder and create,  
> And time for all the works and days of hands  
> That lift and drop a question on your plate;  
> Time for you and time for me,  
> And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  
> And for a hundred visions and revisions,  
> Before the taking of a toast and tea.


	6. Having Him For Breakfast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is one breakfast-to-breakfast span of time.
> 
> The BSU team investigates the Totem Pole Maker case and Hannibal consults. Jack has his suspicions about Hannibal, and Will does not remember what should have been a memorable night.

When he woke the next morning, Will had momentary disorientation. The room he was in was not in his house. It was totally unfamiliar. Then he remembered that he had seen this room last night and the pieces fell into place. He was in Hannibal's room in Hannibal's house.

He looked at the nearest nightstand for a clock to get a handle on what time it was. There was a clock, but it was nothing as crass as a red digital readout. Its slender hands told him it was nearly seven o'clock. It wasn't the only timepiece on the nightstand. Will's watch was also there, next to his glasses. He hadn't noticed when he set his glasses down the night before, but there it was.

He put the watch on, and was wearing only that as he lay back down, drifting in that lazy place between sleeping and waking. Hannibal was in that state too. He put his arm over Will's stomach and nuzzled in closer like an animal rooting for heat.

"I have places to go this morning," Will said. "Classes to teach."

He expected an argument and was surprised when he didn't get one. Hannibal withdrew his embrace.

"Of course. Business as usual, then. Breakfast?"

Will disentangled himself from the blankets and got out of bed, very reluctantly.

"What do you mean?"

"Breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day."

"No. 'Business as usual.' What do you mean?"

"Acting as if nothing has changed in order to keep our relationship a secret from everyone we know. Or maybe I'm assuming too much. Have we started a relationship?"

Will unbuttoned the cuff to his shirt rather than take off the watch. "Can I at least get dressed before we have this talk?"

"So, secret then?" Hannibal said.

"Not necessarily."

"If it wasn't, you wouldn't feel the need for the armor."

Will sighed. "I think keeping it secret would be for the best, don't you?"

"I'm not agreeing or disagreeing. I'm more interested to hear why you think so."

He sat back down in the bed and leaned over to give him a kiss, which Hannibal accepted but seemed unmoved by.

"I like to work with you. We make a good profiling team. Jack would put an end to that pretty quickly. And, it's probably better for your professional reputation if it didn't get around that you were sleeping with a patient."

"You were never an official patient."

"Try telling people that. Rumor is out the door and down the street before Truth gets her shoes on."

Will was tying his own shoes. Hannibal waited until he was done before he spoke.

"I agree with you, that we should keep our relationship secret," Hannibal said. "For the reasons you cited and more."

"What reason did you catch that I missed?"

"A well-kept secret is a thing to savor, just for the experience itself. Our secret harms no one, and no one has any right to it. No one has any right to the property between your ears unless you give it to them,"Hannibal said. "Keep a part of yourself to yourself just to show you can."

 

Will taught his two morning classes. The material was so familiar he could have taught it in his sleep. He was wearing yesterday's clothes and the emergency tie he kept in the glovebox of his car. No one noticed he was a little more rumpled and distracted than usual.

After class let out, he headed to the BSU. Jack found him right as he walked in the door.

"Will, just the man I want to see. In my office." 

Will went in, sat across from Jack's desk and Jack sat on the front edge of it, not behind it. The effect did not put Will at ease.  Jack loomed over him.

"You took Dr. Lecter home last night," Jack said. "Tell me what happened."

"Nothing," Will said abruptly.  He sometimes had the irrational feeling that people could read him as well as he could read other people. Jack couldn't, but he had a piercing glare that was a good enough bluff to make Will feel uncomfortable at times. It was like a parent saying "I know what you did," and then sitting back and waiting for the child to blurt out all their transgressions under the pressure. "He's fine, physically. Recovering. Holding up as best as can be expected."

"Did he say anything to you about Tobias Budge?"

"He didn't really want to talk," Will said.

"Do you think he would come down and let us take some photographs of his injuries?"

 "Is there something wrong, Jack?"

"I sat in on Budge's autopsy this morning. I don't know if the injuries fit the story Dr. Lecter is telling. Besides the skull fracture that ended his life, Tobias Budge had a crushed windpipe and a broken arm. Each of those injuries would have taken a considerable amount of force. Budge was a strong young man who had killed before. Dr. Lecter walked out of that office on his own steam."

"Do you think Dr. Lecter is lying about what happened?"

"I think he might be misremembering."

"Which is law enforcement talk for 'I think you're lying but I'm going to give you enough rope to hang yourself.'"

"Is it possible," Jack said slowly, "that Dr. Lecter just snapped and doesn't remember killing Budge in a fit of blind rage? Did he say anything to you like, 'It all happened so fast' or 'I don't know what happened.'"

"No. He didn't. He didn't want to talk about it and I think that's fair. I wasn't going to push him. I'm not his psychiatrist."

"But he is your psychiatrist. Did you talk about Budge attacking you?"

"We didn't talk about it at all."

Jack wanted to ask the question _What did you talk about?_ but he held back. He couldn't imagine after seeing how relieved Will was that Dr. Lecter was safe, that he dropped him off at the curb and drove off without saying a word about the attack they both suffered.  For all he spoke, Dr. Lecter was not very forthcoming about his personal life, but he had to have said something to Will, one sentence or phrase even, that would shed light on this. "If he ever says anything strange about Budge I want you to tell me."

"You want me to spy on my own therapist? The therapist you sent me to?"

"Patient confidentiality only works the one way. Will, I'm worried about your safety. If Dr. Lecter is capable of uncontrolled violent outbursts---"

"It was self-defense, Jack!" Will said.

"Self-defense only goes so far. I'm not looking at taking anything to a court of law. Budge was bad news and the fact is indisputable that he was a serial killer who had just killed two cops, hell bent on taking out his friend and anyone who stood in his way. This is for my own peace of mind, so I know Dr. Lecter is reliable to work with the FBI and with you."

"Do you think he's unstable?"

"Just keep an open mind." Jack walked around behind his desk. "In the meantime, I need you to go to West Virginia with me. Someone found a stack of bodies and I could use your help."

Will flipped through the file Jack handed him. "Stack" didn't do it justice. It was a tower of body parts. Impressively gruesome but he could probably glean more in person. "Why don't we ask Dr. Lecter to tag along and consult? Then we can keep an eye on him. "

"I'm surprised you are bringing up the possibility of covert surveillance."

"The sooner he gets out from under your suspicions the better. I can tell you all day, but you have to see for yourself."

 

Hannibal had taken one look at the motel Jack and Will were booked in and kept right on driving. There were limits to being a team player and he drew the line at any place that might give him head lice or a bacterial skin infection. The room at the hotel of his choosing was passable. He looked around. It would do. He put down his bag and hung up his coat in what they called a closet. Then he made a phone call.

 

"He's not coming," Jack said, pocketing his phone. He and Will had been waiting for Hannibal at the head of the small trail that led back to the lake where the tower of bodies was. Hannibal was late, and Will had been getting worried.  "That was him on the phone. He had a panic attack in his hotel room. He said he came all the way here, but he can't make himself go out and look. Can't even leave his room, he says."

"That's not an unusual reaction to trauma, Jack," Will said.

"And he knows that," Jack said "Or maybe he panicked because he's starting to remember what he did."

"He didn't do anything but survive! What's it going to take for you to believe that Dr. Lecter does not have some Mr. Hyde personality lurking in his mind, unknown to everyone including himself? If he remains stoic it shows he isn't bothered by violence and if he breaks down you take it as proof of a guilty conscience, that he's faking to cover up some kind of hidden darkness," Will said. "If he had that aspect to him would I be his friend? If you feel like you can't trust him, trust me. I'm the profiler that you turn to. If you trust my judgement then this should be the end of the discussion. If you don't, then what am I doing here, looking at yet another crime scene? You can't rely on a warped tool to cut straight."

"Your judgement might be compromised in one area and not in another."

"That's just trying to have your cake and eat it, too," Will said and stalked off down the path.

 

Later that night, after a shower to get the stink of brackish water and decomposition off of him, Will went to see what shape Hannibal was in.

"I'm in fine fettle," he said, inviting Will in. "Really."

"Why didn't you call me?" he asked. "Why call Jack?"

"I didn't want you to rush away from your crime scene," Hannibal said. "You didn't. It wasn't a full-blown panic attack, more like the first warning that one might be coming on. A tightness in the chest, that's all. Easily averted if I could clear my mind and relax, two things I couldn't do at a crime scene."

He came closer and touched Will's arm lightly.

"Did you bring pictures?"

"Of the crime scene? I have the file with me…"

"Let me see them."

"Are you sure?"

"I want to help."

Will spread the photos out on the small table. He watched Hannibal for any signs of distress but saw nothing but slightly detached interest. "The bodies are going to Quantico for autopsy, but you can see they are in different stages of decomposition. They died years apart, probably decades."

"He put the freshest on the top." Hannibal tapped his finger on the image of the man at the top of the tower."This was not just the latest piece, but the last. The capstone."

"I think we look for a connection between the top piece and the foundation piece."

Hannibal came around and stood behind Will, looking at the pictures over his shoulder.

"It’s a monument," he said. "If you find the connection between the top and bottom you will find what it’s a monument to." Hannibal wrapped his arms around Will and lightly kissed the side of his neck. "Sad, really. He's very lonely, this killer. This is his legacy. The only way he can hope to impress upon the world of flesh. Better to leave a living legacy of those who bear your impression. That is a way to stay alive beyond death. For this man, his deeds will be buried with him."

"You don't think the families of these victims will remember him?"

"They will remember the people they loved."

Will pretended to look at the photos for several moments, riddling out questions he had already answered. Hannibal's attention had wandered, as had his hands. The question of the totem pole maker no longer interested him.

"Hannibal, at least—fuck—at least let me put the pictures away," he said, as his zipper was undone and one hand began to stroke him.

"Don't look at them. Come away from there to where you can't see them anymore."

Will turned to face him. Hannibal moved in for a kiss, but he pulled back.

"Not looking doesn't make them go away, Hannibal."

Hannibal took his face in his hands. "You need walls, doors with big sturdy locks to put these things behind. Let's try something. Close your eyes. Imagine this totem pole in a room with a tall ceiling large enough to accommodate it. What does the room look like?"

Will closed his eyes.

"A warehouse. Dark and cold with big metal beams."

"Good. Plenty of room in there for whatever you encounter. The bodies are in there, all of them, every dead body you've ever seen and all the ones you will see in the future, but you are outside the room. What does the door look like?"

"A metal roll-down door, like a garage door."

"Pull it down. Imagine the clatter those metal doors make. There's a metal hasp there with a loop. You have a lock in your hand. Put the lock on the door. Did you do that?"

"Yes." Will opened his eyes. "That…works. Why does that work?"

"It works because you have a powerful imagination. You should use it to your own benefit."

"Do you have doors with locks on them?"

"I have doors that are welded shut and plastered over." He was unbuttoning Will's shirt tenderly now.

"What monuments do you have entombed in those sealed-off rooms? Now that we aren't patient-doctor anymore am I going to get to see into those dark corners?"

Hannibal looked at him. "If you want to."

Something behind a door in Will's mind gave an inarticulate howl.

 

Will had stayed in Hannibal's hotel room until the small hours of the morning. He felt like he was emerging from a fog to find himself riding the elevator down to the lobby.

There was a woman in the elevator with him, holding her strappy high heels in one hand, a shiny purse the size and shape of a loaf of Italian bread in the other. She was looking at him with mingled concern—for him, and for herself for being in a small enclosed space with him.

"Rough night?" she asked, gesturing with her Italian loaf purse.

He nodded. "Yes."

"You look how I feel," she said.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

The elevator doors opened with an understated chime.

 

There were parts of the night that were hazy for him. He hadn't been drinking (or had he? There was a foul taste in his mouth that made him think he had, but it seemed too unlikely. Where would they have gotten alcohol?) Sleep deprivation alone shouldn't do this. He had a terrible headache.  Checking his watch, he saw that the breakfast at the motel would just be opening up. He could at least get a cup of coffee.

Will looked with regret at the 'continental' breakfast the motel offered free-with-stay. The eggs had a greenish cast and sat in a pool of milky liquid. The sausage gravy looked like it needed a fork and knife to eat. He loaded up a tray with a bowl of rehydrated instant oatmeal, a yogurt cup, a banana and an apple. It reminded him of elementary school, except now he did not mind sitting alone. Once he started eating, he found that he did have an appetite.

He was facing the doorway and saw Jack come in the small eating area.

"There you are," he said unnecessarily.

He fixed himself a cup of watery coffee and sat across from Will uninvited.

"It's good to see you have an appetite this morning. Time was, a scene like that would put you off your feed for a few days."

Will was running his spoon around the inside of the yogurt cup, getting the last half-spoonful. He already felt a little better.

"You want to diagnose me with something because I'm eating breakfast?"

"I want to apologize."

Will set down his spoon, all ears.

"It isn't fair of me to insist you are irreplaceable to the FBI and then not listen to you when it suits me."

"So you're accepting my assessment?"

"Without reservation. Its a load off my mind."

"So how you are going to make the accounts reconcile? The same inconsistencies are there today as yesterday.  The facts didn't change. Tobias Budge was over-killed by an otherwise mild-mannered middle-aged office-dweller at least ten years his senior."

"Adrenaline," Jack said. "Nothing more sinister than fight-or-flight."

"Impressive. You almost sound like you believe it."

"I need to go where the evidence leads and your testimony has weight with me."

"Thank you, Jack," he said. "I accept your apology."

Jack smiled. "Great."

 

Will asked if Jack could drive back to Quantico, pleading his headache. Jack cheerfully accepted. He felt he was on more secure footing now that they had cleared the air between them. He meant what he said about the suspicion being a weight on him. He didn't want to have questions about his team. Looking back, he wondered why it bothered him so much. A man fought for his life and won, against the odds. 

Jack and Will talked about the case that brought them there and what they were going to do when they got back. Will could keep up his end of the professional chatter while only paying slight attention. He was trying to remember more about that past night. He was afraid that if he didn't drag out what he could now, it would be lost forever, like a dream. Snatches of the previous night rose into focus like morsels stirred up from the bottom of a very thick soup, tantalizing bits that floated away before he could get a good look.

A slope, a curve resolved itself into a shoulder, a flank with a bruise still visible. Hannibal with his head thrown back, throat exposed.

This part was coming through clear now. Will shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat to hide the erection that came with the memory of it. The same imagination that left him feel the grain in the wooden handle of a knife he had never actually touched found it easy to provide him with the smallest nuance of the sensation of lovemaking, even if he didn't have the full visual picture to go with it.

_What's your legacy? Will you make an impression on my flesh?_

Bared teeth and blood. A red smear on pale skin.

In the car, Will rolled up one sleeve, then the other, fearing he would see the two crescent-shaped bite marks that he suddenly remembered. His arms were smooth and unmarked. It must have been a dream he had. His dreams lately had been so vivid and so bloody. He pictured the hotel door, blank white with a card-slide lock and lever handle, and tried to close it. The door failed to latch and swung slowly back open.

"Are you okay? You aren't looking so good. Should I pull over?"

The memory came back to Will in still more detail. This had not been a dream, and he remembered the taste in his mouth and the sickening pop of skin giving way to his teeth.

"Yes. Please."

 


	7. Rosemary and Rue

No matter how he tried, Will could not get the phrase "I'm sorry I bit you during sex" pressed into acceptable text message format. 

This was not an off-hand message he could send. This was a conversation, and it needed to happen sooner rather than later. The longer he put it off, the more awkward it got. Even worse, Hannibal was giving him the room to do it. For the first few days, Will hoped he would get a concerned phone call, even a drop-by to his office so. He wanted to be confronted so he could react, but Hannibal was making sure that Will would have to take the initiative.

Will couldn't even rely on the "calling after business hours" trick because Hannibal kept such odd hours. Will had the feeling if he called the office number at 3 am, after two rings Hannibal would pick up the phone sounding relaxed and fully awake.

Finally, after a week of dithering, it was the day of Will's normally scheduled therapy session. He didn't know if this was something they were still doing, but since he couldn't call to cancel, he showed up in Dr. Lecter's waiting room as scheduled.  At 7:30, the door to the office opened.

Hannibal's expression was set with a polite smile. He didn't look angry or surprised. Will watched for, but didn't see, the slightest clenching of his jaw, or the blink meant to cover the split second it took Hannibal to shift from expressing the emotion he was feeling to the one he wanted people to think he was feeling. Will didn't see that, so he untensed a little.

In the office, they sat across from each other and Hannibal didn't say a word, letting the pressure of silence work on Will to make him speak first. The problem was, Will wasn't sure how to start, so they sat across from each other without saying anything. Their conversation often had eloquent pauses, this was a different, uncomfortable silence.

"I guess I should start with an apology," Will finally said. "I'm sorry. I haven't been in a relationship in a long time. I suppose I don't always know how to conduct myself."

"You default back to the comfort of solitude. It's your nature. I let you have the space you needed to approach things on your own terms. I trusted I would hear from you again when you were ready."

"And here I am."

Hannibal's smile hitched up on one end.  "And here you are."

"I'm not sure how ready I really am."

"Ready enough to explore whether you are ready enough," Hannibal said. "Start speaking and when you feel you have reached the end of your tether, stop."

"The problem is…" Will couldn't sit anymore. He got up and started pacing. Moving his body made his mind feel less sluggish. "The problem is, I want you to talk to me about your feelings."

"This is your time. We'll talk about what you want to talk about."

"But I still need my therapist to be objective."

"Should I give you a referral?"

"I can't trust another psychiatrist with my problems." Will shook his head. "I have problems with my boundaries with other people. Too close, not close enough. We've discussed that before. Now I'm embarking on a new and complicated and wonderful relationship that I need to talk to my therapist about. I need my…" He turned over several terms in his mind, "partner to talk to my therapist." He jammed his hands in his pockets. "After last week, we need couples counseling."

"A psychiatrist who treats himself has a fool for a patient."

Will gave him a reproachful look. _Be serious_.

"I'll do my best to compartmentalize," Hannibal said. He shifted in his seat and leaned forward. "I was a little hurt that you were avoiding me, although I thought I knew why. I had the hope we could work on our problems together. When you withdrew from me, it showed we had not reached that level of intimacy. It’s the irony of the situation that the increasing intimacy is the problem and the solution. You were vulnerable to me and then, it appeared, regretful that you had shared so much."

"I don't know what I shared," Will said. Hannibal turned his head slightly _Go on. I'm listening and interested._ "I don't remember most of the night, and what I do remember I wish I didn't."

"What do you remember?"

Will was walking around Hannibal's desk, tapping the nearly reflective polished surface with two fingers.

"I remember the totem pole crime scene photos, the elevator ride down to the lobby, and not much in between. I remember you walking my through shutting the doors in my mind and us being together and I remember, or think I remember…" he took a breath. "Did I _bite_ you?"

"A little," Hannibal said. "In the heat of the moment, these things happen and to look at it clinically in the cold, dispassionate light of day is unfair. You did nothing to me that I did not allow and even encourage."  Although Will had his back to him, he could hear the smile in his voice.  "You found me toothsome. I was flattered."

Will turned. Hannibal was being way too relaxed about something that should have been at least slightly concerning. "That doesn't bother you?"

"I hear more than my share of the unusual and the deviant. We share a perspective most people don't on the diversity of human emotional expression. If you can think of it, there is a paraphilia for it."

"That isn't reassuring."

"You are making a mountain out of a molehill. I would like to know why this has disturbed you. Do you fear losing control?"

"I fear I have lost control, and will again."

"Because you fear intimacy?"

"I'm not talking about intimacy, either emotional or physical. I'm talking about impulse control. I'm talking about inflicting pain and drawing blood."

Hannibal's eyes narrowed briefly. "You fear this?"

"I _did_ this. When I bit you."

"There wasn't any blood."

"I distinctly remember breaking the skin and the taste of blood in my mouth."

"It didn't happen, not in that way," Hannibal said. "I had one small mark that was almost invisible by morning. Do you remember it differently? Is your memory of that night really that fragmentary?"

"If you are telling me that one of the few things I remember clearly did not happen, then my memory is not only leaving things out, but filling in the gaps with fiction."

"Your delusions are at least based in fact." Hannibal said. "I do have an old scar on my arm. You could have seen it and that fed into whatever dream you had."

"You are being generous calling it a dream. This was a delusion. A very realistic hallucination of violence."

Hannibal considered for a moment. "I am speaking now as your therapist and as a medical doctor. We need to triage. What is of utmost importance is not that you forgot, but why. Headaches, hallucinations, and now losing time. You are getting worse. These symptoms are serious and they have a cause."

"What is the cause?"

"I can speculate, but we can't really know unless you are willing to hear the diagnosis."

Will nodded for Hannibal to continue.

 "Psychosis of unknown origin, possibly Brief Psychotic Disorder triggered by stress. Its also possible there is an underlying psychological disorder. Before venturing down that path, I would like to eliminate all possible stressors and see if that relieves the symptoms."

"You mean cutting the FBI out of my life."

Hannibal shrugged. "Look at the timing of this blackout episode. Hauled away on another mission to solve another crime in an endless parade of similar crimes, each one having a corrosive effect on your psyche. You are complicit in your own disease."

"I can't just turn my back and let people die. No one else can do this."

"Who will do this when you burn yourself out? It is only a matter of time."

"I'll deal with that when it happens."

"It's happening now, Will." His tone got Will's attention. He was hitting each word staccato instead of his usual smooth cadence. "You agree, do you not, that there is some issue you have that ignoring is not solving?"

"Yes, but we don't know it's my work for the FBI."

"Can we make a deal?" Hannibal asked. "If we can eliminate a physical cause, will you agree that these symptoms you are having are psychiatric in nature and probably stress related?" When Will hesitated, Hannibal went on. "I can't continue to see you as a psychiatrist or in a personal fashion if you do not take proactive steps to alleviate whatever is causing your symptoms. To put it plainly, I can't be with someone I don't trust. You had a dream of attacking me so vivid you were convinced it was real. As someone who was recently attacked in this very office, I find the thought distressing. What you do affects me."

"I'm not used to that."

Hannibal stood up and went over to Will and put a hand on his shoulder. "I don't want to suffocate you. I only want to be as close as you want me to be. "

"I know," Will said.

"I have an old friend who is a neurologist. Would you go to see him if I came with you? Your visit would not go through your medical insurance, so it would stay out of your official employee record."

"I'll have unofficial brain scans to go with my unofficial therapy."

"He might be able to get you in as early as tomorrow if I call in a favor with him. Why don't you stay at my house tonight and then we could go to his office tomorrow together? It would put me at ease to have you close by."

"So you can monitor me."

A long blink with a slight nod. _Yes._ "Surely, you can see the wisdom in that," he said. "And maybe I want to spend some time with you."

 

Back at Hannibal's house, they spent a quiet evening in. They had a simple meal and didn't talk about any sensitive topics. As the evening went on and Hannibal did not try to tangle him in a verbal snare, Will relaxed. They talked about setting a fire in the fireplace after dinner, but neither of them wanted to tend it. Will started to nod off in the wing chair, even without a crackling fire.

"Are you ready for bed? Because if you are, I have a surprise for you."

Hannibal led him down the hallway, past his own room to a room a little farther down. He opened the door.

"What do you think?" he said. 

"Is this the guest room?"

"It was, but now its your room. Do you like it?"

The walls were a dark green and, in lieu of a classical painting, there was a framed black and white print of what looked like an electrocardiogram printout. When Will looked closer he could see it was a photographs of ships in a harbor at night, their spiky masts reflected with perfect symmetry in the water below.

On a lacquer tray on the dresser was a collection of small items, all in shades of white: a small china bird, a carved box, a twisted piece of driftwood, a shallow milk glass dish that looked ready to hold the odds and ends out of someone's pocket. Each object was ostensibly white in color, but grouped together the subtle undershades could be seen. Blue milk glass, gray driftwood, creamy stone used to carve the box. Will picked up the china bird and turned it over in his hands. It was the perfect shape and size to fit in his palm.

"Of course I like it," he said. "You made a place for me in your home." Will could picture Hannibal waiting every day for him to call, resigning himself to hearing nothing that day and then coming home to paint the walls or move furniture.

"I knew you would come around." He took the china bird out of Will's hand and set it down in its grouping. "Eventually." They met each other's eyes and Hannibal moved away, towards the door, where he paused. "Will, when you opened up to me, you shared many things. I thought you were embarrassed by your bare honesty. I suppose you don't remember, but I was honest with you as well."

Hannibal had cracked open one of those welded shut doors and shown Will whatever was inside and Will forgot. He felt a sinking hollow place in his chest, an empty socket that should have been full of whatever confidences had taken place. He tried again to reach into the black pit of his memory but still came up empty handed.

"I am sorry I forgot whatever you told me," Will said. "I don't have an excuse. I don't even have an explanation. I hope someday you will trust me enough to tell me again. "

"I was disappointed. It was a step back before we even really started going forward." He gave Will a tight smile. "But the important thing is for you to get you better. Everything will sort itself out from there." He looked around the room as if he wanted to find one last thing to adjust to keep him there a moment longer, but his meticulousness worked against him. He had left nothing undone.

"Get some rest," he said.

 

Hannibal hoped seeing the room decked out especially for Will would cut the sting of the implicit rejection. He would have loved to have Will beside him in his bed all night, even if they were entirely chaste. He desperately wanted to be with him so if (by chance or design) Will had another middle of the night seizure like the one that obliterated his memory the week before, Hannibal could see him through it. But he couldn't risk it. In such close quarters, it would have been impossible to hide from Will the bite wound on his arm that was still in the early stages of healing.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance" Ophelia in Hamlet Act iv, scene 5.
> 
> Rosemary is also a symbol of fidelity. In some traditions it was used both in bridal bouquets and funeral wreaths.


	8. Truth and Elegance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will confronts Hannibal with evidence of a lie, and Hannibal evades the conversation.

All of the tests, blood and brain scan, came back normal.

As Dr. Sutcliffe delivered the news, Hannibal reached out and took Will's hand. When Will looked away, Hannibal gave Sutcliffe a barely perceptible nod.

"This isn't the last word in your diagnosis, Mr. Graham. It just makes out job a little harder, that's all," Dr. Sutcliffe said, with a consoling, practiced smile. "I'm going to write you a few prescriptions. I want you to take them for a few weeks and then come back. We can do the tests all over again." He scribbled on his prescription pad. "I'm also giving you something to help you sleep. Take as needed."

Will looked with dismay at the small stack of papers Dr. Sutcliffe held out to him.

"If this is what you give to people who test negative, what do you give to people who have something wrong with them?"

"If you have any questions about any of the medications, you can ask Dr. Lecter why they are needed."

"Thanks, but I know how to read the PDR," he said.

"Will," Hannibal said, giving his hand a squeeze.

"Besides, Dr. Lecter and I had already discussed an approach," Will continued. "Reducing my stress by scaling back my work."

Dr. Sutcliffe leaned forward and tented his fingers. "I understand your reluctance, and I hate to disagree with Dr. Lecter, but refusing all medication may not be an option," he said. "I feel that your symptoms are too severe to take a wait and see approach."

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Will handed Hannibal the stack of papers. Hannibal shuffled through the scripts, pretending to consider each one. Most of them were his idea. "There isn't anything unusual here. It looks like a lot, but you aren't taking them all at once. If anything makes you feel too altered, we discontinue it, in a safe, medically supervised way."

"It's still your decision," Dr. Sutcliffe said.

"Obviously, I'm out-voted." 

 

Will and Hannibal left the office with the prescriptions and a complicated schedule for introducing the medications gradually and tracking what effect they had on Will. Hannibal would keep two ledgers: one he would show Will and another, more honest one that he wouldn't.

They agreed that Will would carry on at work as usual, but come back to Hannibal's house and sleep in the green room.

"Work means teaching," Hannibal said. "It does not mean extracurricular jaunts with Jack Crawford _et al_."

"What if the Chesapeake Ripper comes back?" Will said. "Do I have your permission to break my vow of abstinence for the Ripper?"

"The Ripper will have to do his business without you for the time being."

 

Will's world became hemmed in and smaller. He found that he enjoyed the simplicity of teaching and then coming home to the green room in Hannibal's house. It was closer to the life he had before he became an FBI freelancer. Mainly this was because he was spending so much time in his own quiet company.

Hannibal was avoiding him. It wasn't as obvious as him leaving a room when Will entered it, but he was keeping his distance. They still talked, but the conversation always bent toward Will's physical and mental condition, what progress he was or was not making with this or that medication.

Physically, Will was feeling better than ever. The drugs were slowing him down and making him docile as a kitten, but whenever he thought of tucking a dose in his cheek to regain his edge, he imagined what might take the place of his apathy.

Hannibal was giving Will the medications Sutcliffe prescribed, mostly. He had a few of his own off-label ideas he wanted to try. Hannibal didn't give Will anything that would inhibit his healing too much. He wanted him functional, for now, so he associated this house and his care with improvement. There would be time for his downward slide later.

 

Hannibal had dressed up and gone out while Will stayed at home in his pajamas. Will was finding it easier to sleep—almost too easy. He started to feel drowsy around nine pm most nights and slept solidly through to the next morning. Very rarely was he woken by a vision blood-drenched corpse. Rarely.

Will didn't quite remember where Hannibal said he was going. He hadn't been invited. Hannibal's full explanation on the way out the door was two words: "out late." Not that Will minded. He felt sleepy right on schedule and had his head on the pillow before 9:30 pm.

He woke, or dreamed he woke, with a feeling he was being watched. He sat up (or dreamed he sat up) and saw in his bedroom Garret Hobbs, linked arm in arm with Tobias Budge. Budge held up his free arm, which hung at a sickening angle. "Thank you," he whispered.

Will woke. His thoughts started slowly, clacking up into clarity like a roller coaster making that first huge climb out of the gate.

Will hadn't injured Tobias, Hannibal had. Hannibal had killed him. Hannibal had broken his arm. When he died, Tobias had an injured arm from Hannibal.

Now, Tobias was telling him, Hannibal had an injured arm.

There was the roller coaster's big plunge.

 

Hannibal was surprised to come home from his night out to find Will awake at the kitchen table, with a book and a glass of red wine on the table in front of him. Hannibal had discouraged him from drinking. It was another variable to account for.

"How was it?" Will asked.

"I had a pleasant evening."

"I hope next time you go out I can accompany you," Will said, speaking carefully. Hannibal thought he might be drunk and trying to cover for it, but he wasn't. He was simply choosing his words carefully.

"That would be wonderful. I admit I have thought about how pleasant it would be to step out with you on my arm. I have imagined it often."

"Because I'm feeling better than ever—more balanced and healthy than I have in a long time. Maybe I'm ready for my debut."

"Maybe. But there isn't any rush."

"You're right," Will said. He put a bookmark in to note his place and closed the book. "I should have to pass a test first. Here. In this controlled environment, where I have my personal in-house doctor to talk me down from the ledge."

"What did you have in mind?"

Will watched for a moment as Hannibal unbuttoned and removed his suitcoat and untied his black bowtie.

"Let me see that scar on your arm. I want to see if it triggers another hallucination."

Hannibal met his gaze and held it. "That isn't a good idea," he said.

"Speaking as my therapist?"

"Speaking as myself, with all my muddled and co-mingled motives."

"You’re here to monitor me. What's the harm?" Will asked.

Hannibal rolled up his sleeve with obvious reluctance, although he didn't try to stall.  He made a fist and thrust his bare forearm out. Will saw the raised pink mark and touched it with his fingers. It was a bite mark. That was not in dispute. Will drew back his hand.

"You know and I know, this is no old scar," Will said. "I _teach_ forensic odontology. I know the difference between an old scar and a fresh wound. What you have, Doctor, is a level 4 bite wound that is still healing. That means you lied to me."

"Yes," he said, rolling his sleeve back down.  "Now you know."

Will thought there would be some satisfaction catching Hannibal in this lie. He would know that he hadn't imagined the whole thing. It was a hollow victory since the reality was worse. Now Will knew when the walls of inhibition came down he didn't _imagine_ he was a violent man, he _was_ a violent man.

"Why would you lie?"

"It was the devil's bargain," Hannibal said. "You forgot the connection we made, but you also forgot how that connection was broken. With blood. You _hurt_ me." The emphasis on the word hurt made it sound as if he still couldn't quite believe it, "but I didn't give it more significance than it deserved."

"Unlike what I do. Making mountains out of molehills, you said."

"You would have constructed a monument to your own failure and used it to bar the door against me."

"It was better that I doubt my own perceptions?"

"Your perceptions are doubtful anyway."

"So you were just going to slip this joker in the deck and let the lie get lost in the shuffle?"

"For your own good."

Hannibal crossed his arms and leaned against the counter, looking away at some impersonal spot on the wall as he spoke. He looked like a picture in a magazine, Elegance in Repose. This seamless façade made Will suddenly very angry. Another patronizing figure telling him what to do and making decisions about his life without his input.

"How can I decide for myself what is in my best interest, if I am not even given the opportunity to know the truth?"

 "The truth lies somewhere between your perceptions and my fabrications."

"I appreciate all your help, but I need to be as complicit in my recovery as I was in my disease. You don't need to protect me."

Hannibal turned his head and the look in his eyes was like a fist in the face. Will actually flinched. He would have been hard pressed to put a name to the expression. Not hate or anger, but something that strong.   _I'm not ready_ , he thought, without knowing exactly what he meant.

"Don't I?" Hannibal said. "This is not that care I envisioned but it is the care you need. You still have headaches and, although you hide them from me, hallucinations and bad dreams. You need to admit your own lies and your motives behind them. I lied to protect you. You lie to protect yourself. You hide your symptoms from me when all I want to do is help you get better. Its counterproductive and you do it out of stubborn pride."

"Do you hear yourself?" Will said. "How bloodless and dispassionate you sound, talking about me as if I'm not even here, like I'm just another profile we're working on. 'Let's dissect this diseased mind.' You don't really care about me as a person and not just a bundle of interesting psychological quirks," he said. "You're distancing yourself from me personally because you've seen my flaws up close and now you're stuck."

"I invited you to live with me in my home. I'm not distancing myself."

 "I don't live with you. I live parallel to you. We don't talk about anything but my prognosis."  He was tired and angry and talking too much. "You never touch me anymore, except to take my temperature or give me an injection. I feel like your roommate or a child."

Hannibal crouched down in front of him and touched his face. The hard expression melted.

"I didn't want to take advantage. I want this to be a relationship of equals. Every step along the way should be your choice. I didn't know if you were capable of that," he said.

Will closed his eyes and felt his thumb stroking his cheek. He had meant "talk me off the ledge" as a rhetorical hook, but now he felt his toes curling over the edge and a long drop down.

"Oh, Will. This is not how I wanted you to break."

"How did you want me to break?" he said with a grim smile.

"From the inside. Pressure to change making you blossom outwards instead of external pressure constricting you."

He spoke through gritted teeth. "I _should_ be constricted--restrained and de-fanged for everyone's safety."

"No. Never. "

Will leaned forward out of the chair and kissed Hannibal roughly, in the half-hope, half-fear that he would be shaken off. He did meet resistance. He was shoved back in his seat, a knee between his legs, snug against him but causing him no pain. Hannibal had pushed him back but followed, returning his kisses eagerly.

"I missed you. Even with you right here, I missed you," Hannibal said. He took off his untied bowtie and unbuttoned the top button to his pristine white shirt, then stopped. "I am trying to do the right and ethical thing." He looked over at the nearly empty wineglass.

"I'm not drunk and I'm in my right mind at this moment," Will said. "And at this moment, I'm saying yes." He reached up and put his arms around his neck. "I missed you too."

 One of Hannibal's hand was over his on the arm of the chair, the other pressed, palm flat, between Will's legs. His response was immediate. He was surprised. Until now, the medication he had been given left him listless and without libido. He welcomed this tension that wasn't in his chest or inside his skull.

Hannibal's hand continued up to his elastic waistband of Will's pants and tugged it down until he was exposed. Will had the words on his lips to tell him to stop so they could move to the bed, but Hannibal's head dipped into his lap and his warm mouth slipped over the head of his cock. The rush of pleasure choked out the words in favor of a pleased sigh. Will gripped the arms of the chair and slid his hips forward. Hannibal used both hands to slide his pants down further, briefly cupping his ass.

Will looked down. As angry as "elegance in repose" had made him, "elegance on his knees" aroused him. He put his hand on Hannibal's neck, the tender and vulnerable nape, and pulled him closer.


	9. I Know a Handsaw When I See One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate title: Tools and Jewels

Will would have guessed Hannibal would sleep in corpse pose, on his back with his hands crossed over his stomach, composed even in unconsciousness. Instead Hannibal was splayed on his stomach, face in the pillow, taking up more than his share of the bed. As someone who often tossed and turned, Will was envious of anyone who could sleep that well.

So, of course, he couldn't resist.

He started by  lightly brushing his finger up Hannibal's arm to his shoulder and neck. Next he traced the outer rim of his ear. Hannibal woke, but pretended to be asleep by holding very very still. Will stroked the back of his ear, the crease where it met his head, the small dip behind the lobe.

"What are you doing?" he said finally. He tried to sound sleepy and newly-awakened, face half-buried in the pillow.

"Has anyone ever touched you here?"

"In my adult life, perhaps not. Is there something special about it?" 

Will kissed below his ear and as much as his jaw and neck that was exposed.

"I thought it was an out-of-the-way place."

"That you could claim?"

"Maybe." Will looked critically at him and frowned. "Are your ears pierced?"

"Given enough time, nothing gets past your keen detective's eye."

Will leaned back on his hand.  "Explain."

Hannibal finally picked up his head and opened his eyes. "Explain what?"

"I'm having a hard time imagining any possible scenario that would end with you piercing you ears," Will said. "Drunk and on a dare? Lost a bet? Or was it a rite of passage at some exotic port of call? There has to be a story behind this."

"Why?"

"Pierced ears are so out of character."

"For the character I am now, but I didn't emerge from the womb as the man you see today."

"You are wearing the same outfit."

He buried his head back in the pillow. "It holds up well and never goes out of style."

Will laid back down with his head on his pillow so he could look Hannibal in the eye.

"You said you bought me a watch because you didn't think I would appreciate diamond earrings. Would you? Appreciate them?"

"Sometimes I do." He turned over on to his side and brushed some hair out of Will's eyes, his touch lingering.  "I enjoy beautiful things."

"Oh, wow. That's…really corny."

"I'm sorry if the honest expressions of my heart, simply put, are too homespun for your cynical mind."

"I'm not an object."

"But you are beautiful."

"Would I look even better in diamonds?"

"Personally, I think you would look lovely in pearls."

Will laughed.

"They would go well with your complexion," Hannibal said.

"You've seriously thought about this, haven't you?"

Hannibal sighed and addressed the thought behind what Will was saying. Again, the specter of 'normalcy' had loomed up. "If I want to wear diamonds, I wear diamonds. Do you know what feels nice right next to the skin? Silk. It's like wearing nothing at all. I don't deny anything to myself because I worry what other people would think. What I do in my home is my business."

"Easy to say when your privacy is intact. What if people found out about everything? Every kinky secret or desire you ever had. The complete contents of your medicine cabinet, closet, and nightstand drawer. Wouldn't that embarrass you?"

"I keep all my really twisted things locked in the basement," Hannibal said. "If I am sloppy enough to leave evidence out in the open, I deserve to be caught. But let's assume that I was caught doing whatever this hypothetical terrible thing is. The person who did the prying should feel shame, not me. They violated my privacy. If someone pries into my private affairs and does not like that they find, that's the knowledge they have to live with."

"You wouldn't feel embarrassed? Not even a little? If someone found your diamonds, your silk, your…whatever else."

"I would feel powerful," he said. 

Will looked skeptical.

"It would be like I can read their minds," Hannibal said. "Because when they look at me, I know what they are thinking about.  If I hold my gaze a moment too long I can induce discomfort. My personal choices and preferences invade their thoughts, and they only have themselves to blame."

"That is a unique perspective," Will said. He tried to fit himself into that mindset.  Sometimes he made people uncomfortable in his presence, but it didn't make him feel powerful. He felt defenseless and raw. His strange behavior meant people left him alone. He didn't want anyone to think about him.

"That being said, I'm a private person. A discrete person," Hannibal said. "I care what people think about me, but I don't worry about it. I operate under the assumption that someday everything will be known. It might be after my death. In which case, I'll be beyond caring."

Will put his head on Hannibal's chest. "I don't think you are as cavalier about your own death as you act."

"I live moment to moment, and the thought that death might be waiting for me in any of those adjacent moments makes life more interesting."

Will didn't like the way he spoke about death because he didn't have any doubt that Hannibal was being truthful. It felt like a tiny betrayal that even in the first flush of their time together he would willingly, if not gladly, be taken into the arms of death. _You made me care about you. You are not allowed to leave me. Not now._

 

Will lingered over breakfast with Hannibal as long as he dared, but eventually he had to go. He was late getting to class and didn't have a chance to check his work email until the afternoon.

He was glad he had put it off. Jack had sent him a message with the title "Beth LaBeau Case: New Development." The body of the text was typical Jack, acknowledging Will's desire to stop profiling while asking him to profile again just this one time.

> _There's been another murder that might be related to the Beth LaBeau case. The method of this second killing is similar, but so far we can't find any links between LaBeau and the new victim, Dr. Donald Sutcliffe._
> 
> _If you could just tell us the link. That's all I'm asking. It will take ten minutes of your time._

Will felt a cold prickle from the top of his head and down his neck. Dr. Sutcliffe. His own off-the-record neurologist. He opened the attached pictures, instantly sorry that he did. Jack had only sent him the most graphic ones, hoping to shock him into acting. He closed it down quickly and typed a response, feeling like he needed to purge this as quickly as possible.

> _The attack on Beth LaBeau was personal. Whoever killed her knew her, or felt they knew her, and felt deceived by her. They were trying to unmask her by peeling off her face. Look at exes, maybe former close friends, who show a history of emotional problems. They may have talked to other people or on social media about Beth's supposed betrayal. I'm not ruling out that this person is delusional and has engaged in stalking behavior and the relationship is entirely in the perpetrator's mind._
> 
> _This person feels they have nothing to lose and is destabilizing quickly, as evidenced by the attack on Dr. Sutcliffe._
> 
> _His attack was less personal. He was attacked in his office, not at home. The suspect might be a former patient of Dr. Suttcliffe's or he might just represent to them the medical community at large—another brain doctor who failed at healing their brain._
> 
> _The suspect's poor mental state should be obvious to the people around them, although they might not realize how severe it is. Unless caught, they will kill again and each time it will make less rational sense as their mental and emotional condition continues to deteriorate._
> 
> _I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know, but this is all you are going to get.  I'm not going to go any farther with this case. I would appreciate it if you would honor my wishes and not try to bring me into any more cases. You know what buttons to push and if you ask me, I'll go. So please don't ask._

 Will's fingers hovered over the keys and he added, before he could think better of it. "Unless it’s the Ripper. If the Ripper is active again, call me any time, day or night."

After he sent the email, he called Hannibal to tell him about Dr. Sutcliffe's death. He tried to be gentle. They were old friends.

"It’s a shock," Hannibal said. "I can't help thinking what might have happened to me if the attack in my office had gone differently. Donald was not so fortunate."

"You think he was attacked by a patient?"

"Wasn't he?"

"I thought it was possible. I told Jack as much."

"You were discussing this with Jack?"

"He wanted my opinion. He thinks this murder is related to the Beth LaBeau case. Looking at the similarities in the crime scenes, I would agree, but I don't see the connection in the victim profile unless the suspect was a patient of Sutcliffe's"

"Did you tell Jack about your personal connection to Dr. Sutcliffe?"

"I didn't think it was relevant" Will said.

"I have a confession to make, Will," Hannibal said. "I know what the connection is between Beth LaBeau and Donald Sutcliffe is. It's me. I went to the LaBeau crime scene. After the murder, Jack asked me if you were well enough to consult. I thought if I constructed a helpful profile he would be satisfied. I didn't tell you because this is when we were having our difficulties."

"Did you go with Jack?" It was already done and in the past, but he felt apprehensive about Hannibal being alone with Jack and his suspicious questions.

"No. I wanted to observe without being observed."

"But you might have been observed."

"By the killer."

"Hannibal, don't ever go to a crime scene alone again! You were lucky you weren't killed. You might not be afraid of death but don't actively court it."

"Point taken," Hannibal said. "I did manage to give Jack a vague profile. I told Jack this was a crime of desperation, not of malice. The suspect was in a state of doubt about themselves and the people around them. They will kill again if not caught. Their crimes may have less of definable logical motive as time goes on and they have less and less connection to reality. Jack thanked me, while making it clear that he didn't much value my opinion and would not be taking what I said into consideration."

"There's nothing wrong with that profile. It's a lot like mine."

"I'm not you," he said.

 

Will had a dream that night. He was walking down the stairs into Hannibal's basement. He had never had any reason to go down in the basement before, so his mind filled in fantastical details. In the way of dreams, he descended into an area that looked more like a floor of an office building than the basement of a private home. There was a hallway with linoleum on the floor and doors leading off it. The doors were heavy steel with wire-encased safety glass inserts. The first room he looked into had tables of tools, both power tools and some hand tools all spotless and gleaming.  More tools were hanging up on wall-mounted peg boards.  _Its high school shop class_ , Will thought. _I'm back in high school._ Some of the tools he knew, but some with their curved blades and unusual shapes were specialized for a purpose he did not know.

He continued down the hallway and peeked in another window. This room looked like a hotel room. There was a young woman sitting on the couch, reading a book in the warm light of the lamp. He couldn't see her face past her long straight brown hair, but he thought it must be Beth LaBeau. He was glad he couldn't see her face. He had only ever seen her in crime scene photos and however lovely she was in life, her killer had made her nightmarish in death.

He moved on down the hall. From behind the next door he could hear music. It must have been loud in the room for him to hear it through the heavy door. This room also looked like a hotel room. There was a woman in this room as well, a blonde.  It took him a moment to place her. Miriam something. One of Jack's trainees who was killed by the Ripper years ago.

Will looked down the hallway and the remaining doors. He didn't want to see what was behind any more of them. It was a hall of the dead.  Was Beth LaBeau also killed by the Chesapeake Ripper? No. That wasn't the connection, but he could not figure out what the connection was.

He turned to go but was suddenly grabbed from behind. He was falling slowly to the floor. He felt like someone was easing him down, but that was the last of the dream he could remember.

The next morning, Hannibal looked tired. You would have to know him and look closely, but there were faint shadows under his eyes.

"You had a bad night," he told Will. "What were your dreams? How much can you remember?"

Will didn't deny he had had a dream. He explained the hallway and the doors he looked into. "Looking at those pictures of Beth LaBeau and Dr. Sutcliffe must have disturbed me more than my waking mind took into account."

"Your unconscious mind is warning you that you'll wind up like this dead trainee. Maybe not dead in body, but as good as dead."

"But what about the room full of tools?"

"Sometimes a handsaw is just a handsaw," Hannibal said. "But really, that's how Jack sees your mind, isn't is? As a room full of useful tools to be picked up and set down as he sees fit. Your dream is telling you to keep the door to your tools closed. I guarantee that they will find Beth LaBeau's killer without you."

"You can't guarantee that."

"Time will prove me right."

A week later, Georgia Madchen's body was found in an old, rarely-visited section of a graveyard within walking distance of Dr. Sutcliffe's office. She was stretched out on a grave and still held the scissors that had been used to kill Donald Sutcliffe. She had died of exposure. It looked as though she just lay down and waited for death to take her.

The Madchen and LaBeau families knew each other. Georgia and Beth had been close until Georgia stared having delusional episodes. Georgia's DNA was found at the Sutcliffe and LaBeau crime scenes. Case closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title comes from that line in Hamlet "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw"


	10. Debut

Will got up and slipped on Hannibal's robe. It was silky bronze-brown and cut a little short, but for some reason he found himself reaching for it. Maybe it was just that it felt nice. Not something he would have picked for himself, but he was always trying on other people's shoes metaphorically speaking. He walked around in killer's skin all the time, why not slip into something a little more comfortable?

 Hannibal was still in his deeply committed sleep.

The night before had been Will's debut into society. Hannibal had taken him out to a fundraiser. There hadn't been any kind of announcement, but it was another of those things that were just known. Quite a few people beamed at Will, pumped his hand and emphatically said " _So good_  to see you."  

Will had unearthed his old tuxedo to wear. Thankfully, Hannibal had declared it "classic styling" rather than out of date. He would have worn it anyway, but it had saved him a lot of grief.

The accessories had been another story. The tie was pre-tied and went right in the trash. Will could not find a set of shirt studs and cufflinks. He tried all the pockets and came up empty. He couldn't remember the last time he wore the tuxedo and couldn't begin to retrace his steps.

Hannibal had disappeared into his room to get a proper bowtie and came back with that and a clamshell box covered in light blue velvet. He handed it over without ceremony and looped the tie around Will's neck. Will opened the box and saw a complete set of shirt studs and cufflinks, each nestled in its own little divot.

"Thanks. I promise I'll be careful with them," he said.

Hannibal was fixing his own tie in the mirror, a near-frown of careful but unworried concentration on his face.  When he was done, he was pleased with the overall effect and smiled before he turned.

Will remembered being on the police force, back when he was in uniform and how satisfying it was to look in the mirror have his entire uniform perfect. Nothing slipshod or threadbare. The edge of his belt buckle aligned with his zipper, the ironed-in pleats of his pant legs falling in two straight lines to his polished shoes. It had been satisfying.

"Be as profligate as you like," Hannibal said taking the first stud out of the box. "They are yours to lose."

 Hannibal insisted on fitting them himself, under the guise of teaching Will how to be presentable.  Will knew how to use cufflinks and how to tie a bow tie, but Hannibal enjoyed showing him and Will found he enjoyed his enjoyment.

Will admired the cufflink once it had been set in place. Black mother-of-pearl with a platinum border. He did not hate them.

"What are you wearing?" he asked.

He turned his wrist so Will could see the cuff. "Classic onyx."

Classic, but understated. Will took a second look. Hannibal's whole ensemble had no extraneous details, no flourishes. No pleats on his shirtfront, or an unexpected fabric.  Nothing flashy at all.

"Classic?" Will said, playing up his incredulous tone. "Simple. Some would say plain. Are you...possibly… _toning it down_?"

He straightened Will's tie and smoothed down his lapels with both hands. "I dim my light for no one," he said.

 

Will didn't enjoy the night out  _per se_ , but he liked that Hannibal was obviously proud to show him off. He was used to being treated like a bit of machinery that was useful but unsightly and best kept in the back room. Like an industrial meat-slicer or one of those cow-stunners they use at the slaughterhouse. To be fair, Hannibal had never treated him that way, even when that's how Will thought about himself.

Elaine Komeda was at the fundraiser and it had been nice to see her again. She had said hello to Will by plucking the glass of whiskey right out of his hand. "You remind me of my late husband, Len," she said, setting the glass on a neighboring table. "He didn't drink all the time but when he did, he meant it."

"What am I going to drink now, Elaine? Water?"

"Champagne," she said, taking two glasses from a passing waiter's tray and handing him one. "Its physically impossible to get drunk off champagne. Its true. You fill up on all the bubbles before you get enough alcohol in you to get drunk."

"I think that would only work if you built up some base tolerance to alcohol."

"Are you saying we haven't?"

Will would not have chosen Elaine out of a crowd to be his friend. Her severe haircut and the way she held her skinny frame telegraphed a leather-toughness covered with only the thinnest outer layer of velvet and polish. But she was more self-effacing than she seemed and her acerbic wit walked the perfect line just this side of rudeness.

"Since the last time I saw you it looks like you've aged three years and I mean that in the best possible way," she said. "You don't look so green around the edges."

"Have I lost my innocence?" Will replied.

"You tell me," she said. She sipped her champagne and looked at Will as if she really did expect to be told.

 

Will didn't quite stumble home, but he was loosening his tie before he and Hannibal got in the door. He saw the slight concern in Hannibal's eyes that he was going to start scattering his new shirt studs across the floor of the front hallway.

He held out his loose fists in front of him. "To be safe, cuff me…or uncuff me."

"First things first. Jacket."

Will slipped out of it and handed it over. "In formal dress the suspenders are considered undergarments," Will said, "so a gentleman never removes his jacket in public."

Hannibal's precise fingers flicked out the cufflinks.

"Reading up on your etiquette?"

"I didn't want to make an ass of myself," Will said. "I feel better when I'm prepared ahead of time. Things seem less daunting when I've done my homework."

Hannibal was still holding Will's hands. He held them up to his face and kissed the palms.

"You had a good time?"

"It was tolerable. I'm glad to be home."

With his shirt properly unfastened, Will started to shimmy out of it as he walked down the hall. As Hannibal followed, Will's cufflinks rattled in Hannibal's pocket like dice. When Will shed his shirt he expected Hannibal would pick it up and fold it over his arm like a  _maitre d'_  but he left it where it fell.

"Isn't that going to bother you?" Will asked.

"I'm neat, not compulsive," he said. "If you are stripping, I'm watching you, not the clothes you discard."

Will flopped down on the bed. "I have to disagree with Elaine. Champagne will make you drunk if you drink a bathtub-full."

"I only measure plonk in bathtubs-full," Hannibal said.

"That wasn't plonk, I'll give you that." He ran his fingers through his hair, loosening it up, and making a satisfied noise.

"Are you going to sleep like that?"

Will was half-dressed. His legs were hanging over the edge, feet on the floor.

"I might."

Hannibal nudged Will's foot with his own. "Before you go to sleep, I have something else for you. A companion piece to the formal set I gave you earlier."

"Do I have to sit up?"

"You can receive what I have to give you lying down."

"Oh, I bet." Will said with a smirk.

"Close your eyes."

He did, expecting the next thing he experienced to be a touch on his bare chest or a "helping" hand to finish undressing him. Instead, Will felt something on his throat. It was cool and glassy and had a weight to it. It was already warming to his body. He sat up and cupped the necklace as it fell into his lap. It wasn't a strand of Jackie O perfectly round and creamy pearls. The pearls were irregularly shaped and different shades of dark, more interesting than carefully matched perfection.

"This is beautiful," he said. He pulled the strand up and let the pearls show their order, the alternating patterns of light and dark. "It wasn't what I was picturing." He wrapped it around his wrist twice, just to see what it looked like.

Hannibal took his hand and lifted it. "You needed two strands I see."

"Hardly," he said, slipping the loops off like bangles. These clacked against each other with a sound heavier than glass.

"You can tell real pearls by running them over your teeth," Hannibal said.

"You wouldn't slip me fakes," he said, but gently rubbed them against his teeth anyway. He could feel the same heaviness that he had just heard, and felt the gritty surface that had been undetectable to the naked eye.

"You can feel the imperfections," Hannibal said. "It's how you know they're real."

"Should I wear them now, or save them for a special occasion?"

"If you wear them now, that's occasion enough."

It was the only thing Will wore to bed.

 

When he was on his back the pearls moved and flowed like water, pooling over and beside his neck. And when he was poised over Hannibal, the strand swung gently between them. With a single movement that was agile and full of animal grace, Hannibal caught the strand in his teeth.

Will stopped and with a toss him his head, like flicking the reigns of a horse, Hannibal bid him to go on. Will couldn't move very much without the strand tensing and threatening to snap. With this limitation, he had to carefully concentrate on his own movements. He could picture the vertebra of his lower back moving sinuously one at a time. Will had no choice but to think of himself alone. How his own body felt absorbed his whole attention and it was liberating.

Will couldn't cast himself into his lover's minds and experience himself from the outside. That's not how it worked. But he did get sucked deep into reading their body language and anticipating their needs at the expensive of his own wants.  It made him attentive and giving at the cost of spontaneity and raw passion.

But now he was wholly in his own body and mind, responding to no one's needs or wants but his own. He could do this safely because he was on a short leash, kept steady by a single rope of pearls.

 

Will had a lot to think about in the sober light of morning, but none of it was regrets. There hadn't been another time in his recent memory that he had been a happy drunk. Excess had always led him to self-loathing, feeling bad about himself that night and worse the next day. Today was different. He could blame the champagne, but that didn't explain the difference. It wasn't the beverage but the man drinking it. All a binge would do is magnify what was already there. If self-loathing drove him to drink, the feeling was still waiting for him on the other side of the numbness. 

Will was thinking about this the next morning as he walked down the hall. He didn't notice the kitchen light was on and the smell of coffee was already in the air. He padded into the kitchen barefoot and distracted.

Jeffrey was sitting at the counter, reading the paper. In his chunky-knit sweater, with his close-clipped beard, he resembled a retired sea captain. He looked at Will over the top of his half-moon reading glasses.

"Good morning," he said. "Coffee?"

There was a small battered coffee pot on the counter by Jeffrey's elbow. Will had never seen it before. The dingy exposed cord hung down over the drawers.

"Where did that come from?" he asked.  _Where did you come from_ , he thought.

"I can't work Hannibal's contraption," Jeffrey said. "I'm allowed to use this if I put it away when I'm done. I can't even complain since I'm the one who bought that damn coffee thing for him. When will I learn not to provide him with something he can then inflict back on me?"

Will raised an eyebrow, but kept a friendly expression. "Are you throwing out some verbal bait to see if I'll bite?"

"I know you make your living by thinking the worst of people, but not everything's a trap, Agent Graham." He set aside the paper and settled his gaze on Will. "I'm just making conversation with an overtone of gentle ribbing. You wouldn't be here if you didn't like banter."

Will slid a mug over to Jeffrey, who poured.

"I despise banter," Will said.

"You despise _inane_  banter. Small talk from small people."

"So…You show up unannounced, yet again," Will said. "Just what are you trying to catch Hannibal doing?" On the chair, he could see a small pile of his folded clothing from the night before. His shirt had been picked up from the hallway floor, shaken out and folded. "Or have you just caught him?"

"I'm not trying to catch him doing anything," Jeffrey said innocently. "My schedule changes. I drop in unexpectedly. Its what I do."

"Do you surprise your other lovers this way?"

"There are fewer 'others' than you think."

"Don't you have a sailor in every port?"

"I did at one time, yes. Not so much anymore."

"Why not?" Will asked. "And why did you keep this particular port?"

Jeffrey laughed, briefly but heartily. "And I thought I was in trouble with a psychiatrist! Now I have to contend with a psychiatrist and a criminal profiler."

"That shouldn't be a problem, unless you're a criminal," Will said. "Although, it has been said that there are more psychopaths in positions of power in the business world than in the general population. Only an estimated 3% but that's more than general population has with slightly less than 1%." He took a sip of his coffee. "For the record, I don't think you're a psychopath."

"And I don't think you're a psychopath."

Jeffrey waited to see if Will would add  _and I don't think Hannibal's a psychopath_.

"I'm glad we agree on our mutual sanity," Will said.

Jeffrey refilled his own cup and held up the carafe. "More coffee?"

"I'm good," Will said. He looked down into the mug.  "So what's the protocol here? Do we share custody? I get Hannibal Monday, Wednesday, Friday and alternating Sundays or do I make the concession that your time is limited, pack a bag, and fade away until I'm told the coast is clear?"

"God forbid we socialize like adults," Jeffrey said. "If you don't want to be around me, I'm not offended. No pressure to be sociable with me. I'll say, on my side, I have no qualms about sharing."

"Sharing what?"

"Living space, the dinner table, my coffee," He made a vague hand gesture "whatever else." Jeffrey rose to wash out his mug. "Have you moved in or is this just a sleepover?"

"Its complicated," Will said. "My health hasn't been that good lately. So I came here for personal care. I was not doing well for a while."

Jeffrey grimaced slightly. "Sorry." He remembered Hannibal telling him  _He's quite ill but he doesn't know it yet._ So now he knows, Jeffrey thought

"I'm doing a lot better now. Somewhere in there, I think we've moved away from a clinical relationship."

"Good. Good."

Will thought he picked up on a small trace of discomfort in Jeffrey. Maybe he was one of those people who didn't like to talk about illness. Or maybe he thought he was about to be bored with a recitation of a near-stranger's aches and pains.

"So are we adults?" Jeffrey asked.

"Near enough."

"Then how about we all go about our business today and plan to meet back at home tonight?" Jeffrey said. "We can see if we get along as a trio. If not, then we work out revolving visitation--which sounds like a chore, frankly."

"At the end of the night, who gets shown the door?"

"No one. That's the beauty of it. Everyone finds their own room and gets snuggled up like bugs in a rug 'til morning. No pressure, just think about it." He folded the newspaper as neatly as he had folded Will's shirt. "If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go say good morning to our sleepyhead."

Glib. Impulsive. Superficial Charm. Maybe Will would have to rethink his hasty profile.


	11. Duende

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeffrey, Hannibal and Will have a civilized meal together to see if they can get along as a trio.

Jeffrey and Will had more in common than Will would have thought. Despite his business successes, Jeffrey had started out from humble beginnings in the South.

"I was a self-made man, back when such things were possible," he said.

"What's your opinion on country music?" Will asked.

"Pro," said Jeffrey. "But only the really twangy old stuff, not this pop fusion nonsense made palatable for bubblegum tweens." A trace of his Georgia accent bubbled to the surface as he talked.

"Your southern is coming out, bless your heart," Will said, smirking down into his plate.

"I have a cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains. We should go sometime."

Hannibal who tipped the wineglass in his hand towards Will. _You're welcome to it._

Jeffrey waved dismissively at Hannibal. "Never mind him. He never wants to come with me. He's an indoor creature. Likes to travel, but its always centered around places with a roof over them: concert halls, museums. He's not what I would call outdoorsy. But I can't blame someone who had to fight to survive for not wanting to rough it when they don't have to." There was a look that past quickly between them before Jeffrey went on, speaking a little louder than he had been. "I've never dipped lower than middle class myself, so sleeping outdoors and cooking over a campfire is recreation. I'm privileged. I know that. If it stops being fun, I can throw my gear in the car and drive back to my nice warm house. "

"My fortunes have dipped much lower than middle class, and I still find camping to be relaxing," Will said.

"What about it do you like?"

"I enjoy the solitude. It's peaceful."

"Isn't it, though?"

"And there's something to be said for going out and catching my own dinner, cooking it up fresh."

"Swimming one minute, eaten the next," Hannibal said.  "Just like nature intended."

 

After they had eaten, Hannibal stood to clear but Jeffrey stood and waved him down. "Relax," he said. "I have dessert." He left the room and came back with a brown, handled shopping bag he put down on the table.  "Chocolate," he said and handed each of them a tiny, but elaborately-wrapped box. It couldn't have held more than a single chocolate. Will looked at how he would approach opening it, but Hannibal set his box down and brushed in to the side with one hand.

Jeffrey was reaching into the bag again. He took out a wrapped parcel and put it down in front of Hannibal.

"Presents."

"What did you get me?" Will asked. The evening had gone well, he felt he could joke. To his surprise, Jeffrey handed him a shoebox-sized package, heavy for its size, then said "Wait" and handed him a long flat box that was very light.

He opened the heavy one first. Hannibal had set his gift aside and was watching Will. Inside the box was an antique book with a brown tooled cover and ornate gold lettering. 

"The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology," Will read and then thumbed through the pages.

"It's not in the best condition," Jeffrey said. "But the man who filled this out had an interesting mind. The marginalia, most of it in French, has a skeptical tone that I appreciated. I thought you might as well."

"What if I don't speak French?"

"You do," Jeffrey said. "You were a cop in New Orleans. A bright and thorough fellow like yourself would pick up workable French. And if you didn't, Hannibal would give you a crash course. He did for me. He hated the way I spoke French…"

Hannibal interrupted. "Like a foul-mouthed toddler—hello, goodbye, the days of the week and swears."

"…so he spoke nothing but French to me for a whole weekend. If I responded in English, he ignored me."

"What happened?"

"He swore at me in Spanish," Hannibal answered, "and Mandarin."

They laughed.

"Well, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of swearing at him in French," Jeffrey said. "Here, open the other one. I promise you I did not buy this today. When you open it, you'll see what I mean."

Inside the box, under the tissue paper was a robe, nearly the twin to the one Will had worn that morning in the kitchen, only a deep, shimmering midnight blue.

He lowered it back down into the box.

It was a step away from being given underwear. Too intimate. He would have accepted this from Hannibal, maybe, but not from Jeffrey.

 His face must have given away his state of mind. Hannibal gave him a chastising look.

"Thank you very much," Will said without much feeling.

"Let's see what he brought me," Hannibal said brightly, opening his present. It was a statuette of a nude woman reclining on a black lacquer bench. It wasn't the most artful, being crudely carved, the woman in an unnaturally bowed pose.

"A doctor's lady," Hannibal said, delighted.

"When it was considered obscene for a woman to disrobe in front of her physician, they used these little statuettes, so she could point out what was bothering her," Jeffrey said. "Doctor, it hurts me here, that sort of thing. It preserved dignity on both sides. The lady could be modest and still get treatment for her malady."

Hannibal turned it this way and that in his hands. "She's lovely. I'll find a place for her right away." He took his lady into the next room.

Jeffrey folded his hands on top of the table. He considered taking a hard line with Will and calling him a spoiled brat, but he thought that Will wasn't the kind of person that could be called out with sudden bluntness. Will knew how to drop a verbal bomb and calmly step back to watch the effect. He would meet like with like. Rudeness would bring out rudeness; attack would meet swift defense.

The upside to that was that he might appreciate the gentle approach and not see it as a weakness.

"I'm sorry if I embarrassed you with a gift that was too personal," Jeffrey said. "Its something you will have to get used to.  Giving gifts makes me happy. If it makes your skin crawl to know someone out there in the world is thinking of you, considering your tastes and preferences, someone who wants nothing in return but a sincere thank you and acknowledgement of their thoughtfulness…" he shrugged "… this will never work."

"Accepting gifts is difficult for me. I'm always looking for the strings, the quid pro quo."

"I do get something out of it," Jeffrey said. "It makes me feel good to know I can pick the perfect gift for someone. It’s a way to know them. Know the desires, know the man." He leaned forward. "I swear when I saw you walk out in that robe this morning I nearly fell out of my chair. I thought I had nailed it.'"

"You should have bought me a crappy little coffee pot."

"Next time," he said. The ice had been at least partially melted. "Hannibal is taking an awfully long time to place his doctor lady."

"I'm sure it has nothing to do with leaving us alone to talk."

Will busied himself with straightening up the paper they had torn off their presents. "You've known Hannibal a long time," he finally said.

Jeffrey smiled in anticipation of what question he would get about one of Hannibal's quirks. "A long time."

"Do you think he would ever snap and hurt someone?" Will asked. "Does he have some well-hidden reservoir of rage? Could he hurt someone without knowing it?"

This wasn't the question Jeffrey had been expecting.

"No. He couldn't," Jeffrey said.  Hannibal had hurt plenty of people, but it was always a deliberate choice and something he had complete control over. "What brought this up?"

"Someone we work with at the FBI had questions about the Tobias Budge incident. They seem to think the injuries Budge experienced show a greater than necessary amount of force."

"I'm not following. Who is Tobias Budge?"

"The man who attacked Hannibal in his office."

"When was this?"

"Hannibal didn't tell you? Hannibal's patient was killed right in front of him by his supposed friend and then he attacked Hannibal….He didn't tell you any of this?"

Jeffrey was turning  his empty wineglass around by the stem, watching the dregs at the bottom. He didn't ask Hannibal for every detail of his life, because he didn't want to know, but this was a big one. Hannibal had openly killed someone--in self-defense, it appeared-- but someone in the FBI was asking questions about it and doubting Hannibal's version of events.

Jeffrey and Hannibal had, over the years, worked out the intricate provisions of the contract of their relationship. One of the top provisions was that neither of them would call attention to Hannibal's crimes.

 

_It was late at night. Jeffrey forgot why he was awake, but he was. He was in the kitchen. Hannibal came in the backdoor and he was bleeding. There was blood on his shirt front and cuffs, on his face and knuckles.  He walked calmly past Jeffrey and started washing his hands at the sink._

_"Hannibal, what happened?"_

_"I got in a fight."_

_"A fight? Were you mugged? Did you tell the police?"_

_"The police know. If they don't, they will soon."_

_He was checking himself over like the calm medical professional he was. He was feeling the ribs on his left side with his right hand. He ran his tongue over his teeth and spat in the sink._

_"Spitting in the kitchen sink? That's disgusting." Jeffrey was shaking a little. He didn't like Hannibal's demeanor. "It's unsanitary."_

_Hannibal flicked on the faucet and rinsed out the sink._

_Jeffrey watched him with dread and curiosity. There was something wrong about this and right about this._

_"What happened?"_

_"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," Hannibal said before he left the room. Jeffrey was frozen in place. When he could finally move he followed Hannibal to the bedroom._

_"What happened?"_

_Hannibal looked at him, sized him up and decided he was as ready as he ever would be._

_"I killed a man tonight," he said, lacing his bloody, injured fingers together. "I've done it before and I will do it again.  I did it because I like it."_

_If it wasn't for the blood, it could be a sick joke. But Jeffrey couldn't deny the blood._

_"You've done this before? Killed someone?"_

_Hannibal nodded and smiled at the memories. "Many times. For example, when you left me in Paris after the first time we met, I killed a man later that day. He picked me up in the same bar you did. He paid for my drinks, like you did, but he made the mistake of wanting me to come back to his room instead of coming with me to mine. So I went with him to his room, then I gutted him like a trout. Then I went to your hotel room, drank some wine, ate dinner and had a good night's sleep."_

_"Why him and not me?"_

_"I saw the way you looked at me. You adored me. You followed me. I was young; that was reason enough," Hannibal said. "I wanted to see you again, you know. I held on to that business card for years, but I didn't contact you after that to keep you safe. I was too impulsive back then, but luckily for me, fortune cares for fools."_

_"I still adore you."_

_"And that keeps you safe now," Hannibal said. "I can see you believe me. Are you scared?"_

_"I'm not scared," Jeffrey said, knowledge dawning in his mind as he spoke. "I'm excited." Hannibal had never felt entirely safe to Jeffrey and now he knew why. It made sense. Jeffrey felt that he was lucky in a way. Hannibal was dangerous, but not to him. He had some violence in his soul, but not for him. It was the rest of humanity that needed to be afraid. There was something about Jeffrey that pleased Hannibal. He had been spared, and continued to be spared in Hannibal's ongoing grace._

_"You are a risk taker, Jeffrey, and going home with me that night was the biggest risk of them all."_

 

As they all pitched in cleaning up, Will was hyper-aware of how he interacted with Hannibal in front of Jeffrey, while Jeffrey and Hannibal were seeminglt at ease with each other and Will. _Of course they are relaxed, they've done this routine before. You aren't the first sailor in this port._

They looked so comfortably domestic, Will found himself wanting to leave them alone to decompress and catch up. He searched his thoughts for jealousy and didn't find any. He drifted back into the dining room and took his time bringing in the rest of the dishes. In the kitchen, Hannibal washed and Jeffrey dried.

"I think this is going well," Jeffrey said, then leaned in closer. "He told me about his health. So he found out he was sick?"

" _Is_ sick, but he's had a remission under my care," Hannibal said. "Unfortunately, his neurologist met a tragic end before he could make a definitive diagnosis, so he might have a relapse."

"Tragic end, meaning horrifically murdered," Jeffrey said. "Is Will supposed to have done that?"

"Not right now, but the situation is fluid."

"I like him, Hannibal," Jeffrey said grimly.

"So do I," Hannibal said. "but sometimes we have to make a difficult decision for the best of those we care for, even when they don't see the logic in it. Chemotherapy is a nasty thing, but we give it to children. We give them poison, even as they look up at us with beseeching eyes and beg us to make the pain stop."

 

That night, for the first night in a long while, Will couldn't sleep. It wasn't bad dreams keeping him awake or fear of dark places. He was lonely. Nothing profound about missing the person you want to have next to you in bed. It was as common as tap water. At one time, he thought he might have killed for a common problem, but it still ached.  

The clocked moved forward in small increments as Will blinked his eyes. 10:31, 11:57, 1:08. He got out of bed and left his room, careful to close the door quietly behind him. He didn't hear a sound. He walked towards the kitchen thinking of the warm milk Hannibal had once made for him. Nutmeg and vanilla, a splash of brandy.

He slowed to a stop in front of Hannibal's door. He had made a gentleman's agreement with Jeffrey; everyone 'snug as a bug' in his own bed. But he didn't feel snug. He looked over at Jeffrey's closed door.  It wouldn't be wrong to just go into Hannibal's bedroom if they were just going to sleep. Jeffrey said he didn't mind sharing.

Will turned the knob and swung open the door to Hannibal's room—and then swung it shut almost as quickly. He had gotten a glance so quick it was a still picture in his mind, but he didn't need movement to reconstruct everything that had come before and everything that would follow.  Hannibal was not alone.

Will leaned against the wall and then sat in the universal pose of dejected people who sit in hallways: elbows on knees, head down on crossed arms. _Gentleman's agreement_ , he thought bitterly.

The door opened. _What if they invite me in?_ he thought.  _Not to participate, just to watch._ Eyes firmly shut, he tried to banish the thought that tickled his mind. _What if?_

Hannibal was standing in the doorway, wearing the bronze robe and nothing else. The fabric was thin. He shut the door and stood for a moment and then sat on the floor, back flush against the wall opposite, mirroring Will's pose.

"That was new," Will said, without lifting his head.

"We are sharing so many new things. We need novelty. Without it life would be boring and we would be boring people."

Will groaned.

"Are you going to run screaming into the night?" Hannibal asked.

"What? No. I'm not shocked, just embarrassed," he said. 

"So you had the same idea as Jeffrey. He just acted on it sooner. It is a matter of poor timing."

"Speaking of timing. Tick tock, someone is waiting on you. You should go back in there."

"The moment has passed."

"It wasn't even going to be that for me," Will said. He realized how silly what he was going to say would sound, but he said it anyway. He gave a self-mocking smile and said, "I just wanted to cuddle."

Hannibal scooted over, so they were sitting next to each other instead of across. He looked Will over and clicked his tongue. "I should have paid more attention to how this evening would have depleted you. Were you having trouble sleeping?"

"I don't have trouble sleeping with you next to me."

Will put his head down on Hannibal's shoulder. Hannibal smoothed Will's hair and gave him a kiss on his forehead.

Desire hadn't sent Will down the hall, but having Hannibal next to him, with only the thin fabric covering him made him want more than just his arms to sleep in. For all Hannibal's cool, casual conversation, his color was high and his skin was flushed. Will  knew how silky it was to have just this robe next to his skin, with the soft fabric skimming and floating away as he moved. He could see how with just a touch, it would fall away.

Will slipped his hand under the crossed front to touch Hannibal's chest. With just the smallest shrug, the robe slid away from his shoulders smoothly. The belt was still knotted at the waist but it did nothing to hold together the front of the robe, now just a vague suggestion of modesty. Will kissed him, crawling into his lap, crawling into the circle of his arms and bent legs.

He waited for resistance, a call to sanity. Instead, Hannibal undid the single knot and laid down on the carpet and Will was drawn to him, over him.  Will kissed him and he felt rooted. He lets his hands roam where his mouth would have: cheek, throat, chest, hip, thigh. Hannibal was ready, wet and open to his fingers.  Will didn't want to think too much about why. He merely accepted it as a favor of coincidence from a universe often intent on screwing him over at every opportunity.

Will broke their kiss because he wanted to watch Hannibal's face. The light from above drove all the stark shadows and severe angles from his cheeks and brow, and Will felt like he could see him without him being obscured. To Hannibal, Will's face was nearly all shadow, his head outlined in a corona of light.

Will watched for the responses. The flicker of pleasure as he moved his fingers. The hitch and release of Hannibal's breath. Hannibal put his hand on Will's bare shoulder, and when he came he left gouges in the skin that Will didn't feel.

Physically they were as close as two people could possibly be, one enveloping the other, legs intertwined, heartbeat vibrating in each other's chest, but Will wasn't satisfied.

"I love you. Please, let me in."

It was what Hannibal had been waiting to hear.

It was like a trap door opening and Will saw down a deep way. Not to the bottom, but at every level he saw something that called to every level of him. And yet there was still the promise of a chasm below that. He was in freefall, then brought to a sudden stop by the insistence of his body. He rode the waves of his climax away from the edge of the brink he had been teetering on.

 

Hannibal had his head on Will's chest and he couldn't tell if he had fallen asleep. It wasn't comfortable. The carpet was scratchy under their legs. Will didn't want to move. He rubbed Hannibal's shoulder and nuzzled into the top of his head.

"I didn't mean to tell you I love you for the first time like this," he said.

"While we made love?"

"On the floor in the hallway."

"The surroundings don't matter. I'd rather you told me spontaneously because that's how you felt. There's beauty in it, because its us."

"It’s the truth."

"I know. And I love you too."

 

On the other side of the door, Jeffrey waited.

At first, he listened to them talking. Hannibal would work his verbal magic and set Will's mind at ease before sending him off to bed. Their breakfast the next morning would be awkward, but he expected speed bumps.

He did not expect the minutes to drag on, and to hear sighs and declarations of love.

He sat up in bed, switched on the lamp, and started reading the book he had on his nightstand. When Hannibal came in Jeffrey pointedly looked at the clock, and snapped the book shut.

"This is how we're doing things now?" he asked, quietly, viciously. Hannibal shut the door firmly and made sure it latched. "I sit here with my dick in my hand listening to you fuck your newest acquisition? I thought you respected me more than that. And don't curl your lip at me, what you just did was worse than me saying fuck."

"It wasn't the profanity that offended me."

"Well, then what…" Jeffrey said. "Where are you going?"

"I assumed you wanted me to shower before I came to bed, so I'm not smelling of my newest acquisition."

Jeffrey followed.

"Okay. That wasn't fair of me to call Will an acquisition. I apologize. Notice, that's what people do when they've hurt someone's feelings." He waited in vain for the apology he felt—no, _he knew_ —he was due. "You aren't even going to say you're sorry. I have never been so disrespected in my life."

"That can't possibly be true." Hannibal was running the shower, putting his hand under it although it could not have been warm enough yet. "And you didn't have to have your dick in your hand. I was going to take care of you," he said.

"As if I would let your mouth anywhere near me when you are like this."

"Like what?" he said, with a small huff.

"Proactively defensive," Jeffrey said. "Are you doing this on purpose?" he asked. He pointed a finger at Hannibal, partly because he knew how much that would bother him. "You are. You are deliberately goading me and being offensive."

"Why would I do that?"

"You want me to hurt him. You want me to hurt Will. I noticed that my pen knife is out in plain view on my nightstand."

"It came out of _your_ pocket. What are you accusing me of?"

"I won't do it. I like him, and so do you. Why would you want me to hurt him?" Jeffrey asked. "I don't understand any of this. "Or do you want _Will_ to hurt _me_? He's younger than me and stronger. Even with the element of surprise on my side, he could overpower me. Maybe this isn't about how much you value _him_."

"Jeffrey. Your insecurity is showing."

"No, no. This isn't all in my head. You are playing games and I don't want any part of it."

Hannibal turned the shower off and the sudden quiet was eerie.

"You don't see in him what I see. He killed a man and said it made him feel righteous. He's an avenging angel and he carries a sword tipped in blood. He is a force to be reckoned with but its raw and undeveloped. I want to bring him to an understanding of his true self, whatever painful process we have to go through to get there.

"I'm hardly surprised you want to sit out this game, like every other game I've ever presented you with. You don't care what I do as long as you don't have to see it, or in this case, hear it," Hannibal said, "but the minute that you are faced with reality you recoil from it because you don't want to get your hands dirty. If you aren't going to help, at least don't impede our progress."

"I'm not the only one denying reality," Jeffrey said. "I don't understand Will, but he doesn't understand you. He can't. The reality is that Will doesn't know what you are. He thinks he loves you, but he doesn't know you. He asked me tonight if you had the capacity to kill. I wonder if he still would have said he loved you if I had answered 'yes.' I know, and I still love you."

"You don't know everything either," Hannibal said. "Would you like to?"

Jeffrey stood in misery. There was _more_? He couldn't imagine. He didn't want to.

"No," he said quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from the Spanish word "duende," which, as I understand, is difficult to translate.  
> It is the name of a creature in folklore, but has been used as a term in the creative arts to mean having a dark, creative power to it. The poet Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote:  
> "When the angel sees death appear he flies in slow circles...The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death...With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.The magic power of a poem consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptising all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character."
> 
> Duende is starting to show up in English as a loan word, meaning "the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm."


	12. Beauty in It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try to get the rest of this fic out before the finale. Wish me luck!
> 
> And yes, I gave Will a middle name.

Jeffrey slept with Hannibal's warm breath on the back of his neck. Waking up the next morning, alive and unharmed, was a test they both passed. All the same, at first morning light, Jeffrey was ready to go. He woke Hannibal with a few soft kisses to tell him he was leaving. He didn't want Hannibal to think he was slinking out in the middle of the night--or worse, _fleeing_.

"I need some space," Jeffrey said. "And you need to have your honeymoon."

"Are you running off to another continent to wait out my enthusiasm for Will Graham?"

"Absolutely."

 "That isn't necessary."

"It's only temporary," Jeffrey said. "Absence makes the heart grown fonder. At least that's what I've been told."

 

Will stood in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and looked at the makeshift scaffolding holding up what was left of the nurse.

"Turns out, we had the Ripper all along," Jack said. "We locked him up two years ago for killing his family. He's decided to come out of hiding and confess to everything. We would have preferred a less graphic confession. "

Will circled around the body and the contraption holding it up, studying the intersecting items that had been driven through the nurse and were now suspending her off the floor.

"There's a problem with that theory," Will said finally.

"Don't say it."

"Its not the Ripper."

"Are you sure?" Jack asked.

"It has the right aesthetics." He gave grudging credit. "Whoever did this was meticulous and showed a commitment to craftsmanship."

"He confessed, Will. This crime has all the hallmarks of a Ripper crime, including information that was never released to the public."

"Then someone fed it to him and that's a separate issue. Because I'm sure. I don't feel the Ripper. " Will could see the mulish look on Jack's face that meant he was not going to accept this news unless he was sold on it. "There's no beauty in it."

"Beauty?"

"The Ripper prides himself on creating unique, twisted beauty from the commonplace. This is technically perfect. It has all the ingredients for a Ripper killing, but it isn't." Will struggled with how to put these ephemeral feelings into concrete words. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that the secret ingredient in her home cooking was love?"

"My mother was a terrible cook," Jack said. "Are you saying the Ripper loves his victims? Like Hobbs did?"

"No, not at all like Hobbs. The Ripper doesn't honor his victims. He thinks of them as sub-human. He loves what he _does_ to them. He elevates them. Its his creative pursuit and when he does it, he loves what he has done. He pronounces it good. _This_ killer was angry and did what he did because he had something to prove. He was working hard to convince us of a lie."

"Why?"

"I don't know. And since this isn't a Ripper murder, its not my problem."

He walked out of the facility through the barred doors with Jack trailing behind him.

"You're just going to leave it like that? I don't believe you can."

"It's not even unsolved. You have the man in custody. The bigger problem is if the Ripper finds out about this. He'll want to make sure everyone knows he's not locked up and this guy is just a pretender to the throne." Will's phone chirped and he looked at the display. "It's just Hannibal," he said.

"Do you need to answer it?"

"I'll call him back."

" _Just Hannibal_? You call him Hannibal now?" Jack asked.  "I didn't know you were so chummy."

"Yes. We've become friendly,"  Will said. "He's taken me on as a special case. You should understand that impulse."

"Can I ask how long this has been going on?"

"Me being a special case? My whole life."

Jack clasped his hands behind his back. "Will, I may not be a special case, but I know a few things about profiling. When you said Dr. Lecter's name, you smiled a smile that lit up your whole face  Its not something I often see and in different circumstances, I'd be happy for you. As it is, I'm concerned. It isn't healthy for you to have a close personal relationship with your psychiatrist."

"You introduced us with your fingers crossed, hoping that someone could finally get through all my defenses and talk to me. Congratulations, Jack. You found the key for this lock. I've never seen someone so angry at their own success."

"I was expecting a productive professional relationship," Jack said. "I need to know, is that what we have here?"

"I was never officially a patient."

"Dr. Lecter signed your eval after the Hobbs shooting! That looks pretty damn official to me. Him signing that paper makes you a patient of his, in spirit if not by law." He shook his head "So help me, if anything more than a handshake has passed between you, I will have his license!"

"Its none of your business."

Jack came up close to Will, who braced himself for the verbal tirade he could feel building.

"It is my business because I put you back in the field on Dr. Lecter's recommendation. And I dropped the matter of Tobias Budge because you vouched for him. I based my decisions on the assumptions that these were professional, objective opinions untainted by personal feelings."

"Its not black or white, Jack. The heart doesn't negate the mind. You can have feelings for someone and still be objective about them," Will said. "My opinion of Hannibal is still valid."

"Your opinion has been compromised by rose-colored glasses!"

Jack's bellowing caused Will to take a few steps back. He kept going, walking towards his car.

"Then leave me alone! Just…don't call me. Don't email me crime scene pictures. My opinion has been compromised."

"You can't run away from this.  More people are going to die, Will." And when that failed to fetch him back he yelled "What about the Ripper?"

"Fuck him!"

 

Hannibal listened on the other end of the phone as Will railed against Jack. Will was furious, driving too fast, cutting himself off with more arguments as they came to him. He did not notice how quiet Hannibal was being.

 _Inquisitive people were cutting too close to the bone; first Jeffrey and now Jack. If they could be left alone for a little while longer…_ But Jack's suspicions were rekindled. He wouldn't let Tobias Budge rest in peace. If he found the connection between Hannibal and Dr. Sutcliffe it would be even worse.

Hannibal was so close and now it was in danger of slipping through his fingers. It was time for plan B.

 

"Before we go out and get him let's call it. I say high out of his mind."

Robins was letting his spotlight play over the road, which was empty except for the man walking down the center yellow line.

"I say E.D.P.," Janowski said.

"Okay. Let's check it out."

When the police got a call of a man wandering down the middle of the road, they were expecting a drunk weaving his way home or an older person driven by dementia to get up in the middle of the night and go somewhere that hasn't existed for twenty years. They didn't expect a man clad only in a thin t-shirt and underwear to be slowly but steadily walking down the center of the road.

"I want to go home," the man said and gave an address in a nice section of town. The guy seemed tired and cold but not drunk, high or agitated. Yeah, they could take him back home. Why not?

"Anyone live here with you?" Robins asked him as they pulled up to the curb. "Because we don't want you to be alone."

"I'm not alone."

The man who answered the door confirmed that the man in the back of the squad car had a tendency to sleepwalk.

"He usually stays in the house," he said, bundling him inside. "Thank you for bringing him back. Walking in the road! He could have been killed!"

Robins asked if he had any photo ID that could confirm who the man was.

"Of course," he said and came back out with a driver's license.

"William David Graham…address isn't right."

"He just moved in."

"You have ID?"

He handed over a driver's license. This one had the correct address.

"Ok, Mr. Lecter, thank you," Robins said, handing the license back. "Have a nice night. Take care of your friend there, okay."

"I will."

They  were a few steps away and Robins turned to Janowski. "This don't sit right with me. Maybe we ought to call it in anyway. That guy didn't look right."

"His friend's got it under control," Janowski said.

"You know a cop once returned a victim to Dahmer," Robins said. "Half a handcuff dangling off his arm and they trotted him right back to him."

"Jeez, Mike, not everything is a fucking Dateline special."

Robins was unnerved when he turned back intending to go up and knock on the door Mr. Lecter was still standing in the doorway, watching them leave.

"Your friend…that's not normal, if you'll excuse me saying so," Robins said. "Maybe you should take him to a hospital or something."

"I am a doctor. I'm more than capable—"

"Not for nothing, sir, but he already wandered away once on your lookout."

"Thank you, Officer…Robins, but I can handle the situation from here. I promise you that you won't hear any more trouble from us. "

Officer Robins didn't. In fact after that night no one heard much of anything from Will Graham for a long time.

 

Post cards had followed Jeffrey from hotel to hotel.  "Please come home," they read at first. Then when the pleas were getting too close to begging they changed to "I miss you" and "Can we talk?" " No apologies and no I love yous. As always, the truth with Hannibal was in the empty spaces between the rails.

 _They would be better off without me_ , Jeffrey thought. It was self-pity at first, but the truth of it persisted past the point of bitterness. Without him, they could walk hand in hand to that glorious, and probably bloody, endpoint.

He had been in a layover in Austin when he saw the clickbait headline on Tattlecrime.com. "Chesapeake Ripper Rips again." The last paragraph especially caught his attention.

> "With one former profiler on the case disgraced by accusations of unethical practices and the other sidelined indefinitely, it is unclear who will step into these shoes. Dr. Alana Bloom has been mentioned in connection with the case and may be the next logical candidate. One can only hope she fares better than her predecessors."

The article was vague about Special Agent Graham being "sidelined." Jeffrey found plenty in the archives about Dr. Chilton and the false Ripper, but real facts about what was going on with Will were in short supply. This Freddie Lounds had a few articles with hints and unnamed sources that said a whole lot of nothing if one knew how to see through bullshit.

With anxiety gnawing at his gut, Jeffrey found a number for the BSU. He asked for "Special Agent Graham" and was told he was no longer employed there. A call to the academics office at Quantico told him the same about "Professor Graham." He didn't know Will's cell phone number and he have a home number for Will other than Hannibal's number. He wasn't going to call that.

He went to the ticket counter and got his flight changed from New York to Baltimore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> E.D.P. is cop slang for "Emotionally Disturbed Person"


	13. The Eternal Footman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tipped off by a Tattle Crime article that Will might be in trouble, Jeffrey goes back to the house in Baltimore. He wants to make sure Will is okay (spoiler: he isn't), and how much he wants to get involved when getting involved might mean opposing Hannibal.

In his rented car, Jeffrey drove from the airport past Hannibal's office, slowing without stopping. Hannibal's car was there and the lights were on. Jeffrey drove on.

He let himself into the house. _Its as much mine as his. I have every right._ He wished he had a gun. He had never felt this scared, entering this house _. Damn him_ , he thought.

He called out. There was someone here. He felt a presence and it wasn't the one in the basement.

A shape loomed out of the darkness like a living nightmare. A skeletal form with dark pits for eyes. Jeffrey took a step back. If had a gun, he would have shot it. In a moment, fear was replaced by horror.

"Will?"

The form took another step towards him and Jeffrey had to force himself not to take a step back.

"What happened to you?" he asked. Slender to begin with, Will had lost so much weight, his clothes looked oversized and his eyes were sunken in his angular face.

"I heard a noise," Will said, looking around. "Did you die? I don't remember."

"I'm not dead," Jeffrey said. "Of course I'm not dead. Why would you think I was dead?"

"I don't always know the difference," he said.

"Do the dead visit you a lot, Will?"

"Visit? They've taken up residence. They are vampires. I invited them all in and now I can't get them to leave, even as they suck me dry." He was pale and feverish.  He walked over to the window and put his hand against it, enjoying the coolness of the glass. "The killers, Jeffrey! I asked them to speak to me and now they won't shut up. And with all the racket, I can't hear the voice I really want to hear. The Ripper.  Sometimes the Ripper is thinking about me. I know, but there's nothing I can do about it even if I wanted to. I can't control minds, just read them."

"Do you need to go to the hospital?"

"No! If I go to the hospital they will never let me out again! Its why I'm being treated here." He showed the inside of his arms, fishbelly white and dotted with hypodermic punctures "A new standard of care," he said with a slight smile.

"I need to get you out of here," Jeffrey said, more to himself than to Will.

"I won't go to the hospital."

Jeffrey combed through his memory to see if Hannibal ever mentioned what exactly Will was sick with. He had never mentioned the illness by name, a detail that didn't' catch Jeffrey's attention at the time but now seemed very intentional.

He just needed to get Will to the car without a fight.

"How about I take you to my cabin? A vacation will do you good."

It took way too long for the suggestion to percolate through Will's brain.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah. I'd like that."

Jeffrey helped Will put his coat on over his pajamas and shoved his naked feet into a pair of rubber boots. Frankly, he had expected Will to smell sour and unwashed. When he allowed himself to breathe through his nose he found it was the opposite. He smelled exactly like Ivory soap and baby powder. His hair was disheveled but stood up in unruly wisps, not plastered down on his head with grease. Taking Will's hand, he saw that his nails were clipped short and his hands were clean and soft. Jeffrey didn't like the implications. This man, whose sharp wit he had found so engaging and who had always been so proud and protective of his personal autonomy, was being drugged, then bathed and powdered like an infant.

"Okay, we need to leave right now. We don't want to get stuck in traffic," Jeffrey said, hurrying Will out the door and to the car. Peak commuter time had been over for hours.

"I want to sit in the back so I can sleep. I can't sleep most nights."

"Okay. You sleep, I'll drive."

"I can take a turn driving later. Right now, I'm so tired." Will said. "When I'm asleep its like throwing open the gates to let them roam around and ravage the countryside." He tapped his temple. "When I stay awake, they have to stay out of the light. They can't risk being seen."

It was full dark when Jeffrey's car swung out on the road.

"Are we going fishing?" Will asked sleepily.

"Not tonight, but early tomorrow if you feel up to it." The false cheerfulness was making his face feel tight.

Will sat up quickly. "I need my fishing gear."

"I have everything you need up in the cabin."

"You don't have my lures. That's not possible because I make them by hand. They are one of a kind. The right lure for the right fish; the right tool for the right job."

"We'll stop by your house on the way. You can show me your lures. I'd love to see your work."

"My house is on the way to the cabin?"

"Yes its very convenient." He just had to keep Will pacified until they got to the emergency room. Jeffrey thought longingly of burly orderlies who could pick up Will like a rag doll no matter how he thrashed and fought.

He was watching the road and nearly jumped out of skin when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

"I could snap your neck with my bare hands," Will hissed through clenched teeth into Jeffrey's ear.  "What do you think I could do with the penknife that I took out of your pocket? I'm sick, not stupid. I don't want to go to the hospital. They won't let me out again. I'm sane enough to know how much sanity I've lost."

"I want to help you."

"Help. Help," Will muttered. "I'm sick to death of all the help I'm given."

"I doubt you could snap my neck. Have you seen yourself?  Weak as a kitten. Aren't you eating?"

"Would you?"  Will barked a laugh "I'm asking. Would you?"

"Would I what?"

"Eat the food. If you knew would you eat the food?"

 _You aren't making any sense_ , he wanted to say, but that seemed like a very bad thing to say to an unstable person with a knife to his throat.

"Can I take you to your house for real?" Jeffrey said, his voice dropping into a deeper and more honest register. The cabin, he decided was too remote and too risky. Hannibal would check there first.

He heard the leather creak as Will settled back in the seat.

"I know the way from Baltimore to Wolf Trap so well, I could drive it with my eyes closed. If you deviate from the path by an inch, I will stab you in the neck."

"That would make me crash the car, Will."

"I'm not afraid of my death. The thought that death might be waiting in the next curve of the road makes life exciting. Don't you know that?"

Will stayed awake the whole way, lurching back awake every time his head started to drop. Every time Jeffrey checked in his rearview mirror, Will was glaring back at him.

Will exhausted his energy with his vigilance and when they got to the house, Jeffrey had to half-carry him in. There was a key to the front door above the doorframe.

"Second place a thief will check after under the mat," Jeffrey said to a nearly unconscious Will.

"I don't get many visitors," he slurred, right before he dropped to the porch like a stone.

He was having a seizure. Jeffrey had been afraid something like this was going to happen. His brother James had had epilepsy. Jeffrey learned when they were kids what a seizure looked like. His job had been to make sure there was nothing around James could hurt himself on, while his sister went for the nearest adult. There was nothing on the porch for Will to hurt himself on, so Jeffrey stepped back and waited. He had not missed the helpless feeling of knowing there was nothing he could do.

Once Will stopped seizing, Jeffrey knelt next to him, turned him on his side and tipped up his chin to make sure he could breathe. When he started to stir, Jeffrey dragged him to his feet and all but dumped him on the bed. Why there was a bed in the living room, he couldn't begin to guess, but he was grateful he didn't have to take him any further.

 Jeffrey yanked off Will's rubber boots and folded over the blanket, so he was wrapped up. The house was chilly. Jeffrey sat nearby, smoked the emergency cigarette he kept in his glove box and wished for another. The problem was insurmountable in Jeffrey's opinion. He thought he was going to bring Will to the emergency room and that would be the end of his involvement. Out of nowhere, he was on the run, from _Hannibal_ , with an invalid. It was too late to take Will back and forget it ever happened, but he had nowhere else to go.  

Jeffrey felt useless. Will  was so frail and having hallucinations and seizures, but wouldn't go to the hospital. Jeffrey acted without thinking and now Will was in danger. But, he reminded himself, whether he took him or left him, Will had been in danger either way.

Jeffrey paced for an hour checking periodically to make sure Will was still breathing. He looked around the house, noting the exits. _This place is homey_ , he thought. _He should have stayed here_.

Food. Whatever else Will needed, he needed food to get his strength up. Jeffrey's rattling around in the kitchen woke Will, who sat up and looked at his surroundings blinking like a newborn.

"It hurts," he said. His voice was rusty.

Jeffrey brought him a glass of water. "I know. You are coming down from any number of mind-altering substances and pain killers." He didn't mention the seizure.

"Why am I here?"

"Because you wouldn't go to the hospital," Jeffrey said with a trace of resentment.

"Did I try to stab you?"

"Try? No. Threaten? Yes," he said. "We'll discuss who tried to stab who later. For now, let's get you something to eat. How 'bout tomato soup. You like tomato soup?"  He held up the red and white can.

"Of course I do, asshole! I bought it, so if its there _obviously_ I like it…I'm sorry."

"I won't hold anything you say against you. Withdrawal can make people surly."

Jeffrey plopped the soup in a pan on the stove, added the water and prayed the gas was still connected.

"Why did you take me away? It wasn't to go fishing."

"You're having a lucid moment at the most inconvenient time."

"It comes and goes."

Will walked unsteadily into the kitchen and leaned against the wall. He had the blanket over his shoulders and it dragged on the floor behind him like a train. Jeffrey pushed a mug of warm soup in his hand.

"You asked me if I would eat the food, if I knew. What were you talking about?"

Will licked the rim of the mug where the soup had dripped. His tongue felt weird and slimy in his mouth and the soup tasted like warm ketchup.

"Did I say that? I have no idea. I'm sure I said all kinds of things. I remember telling you vampires were after me. Who knows what the hell I was thinking."

Jeffrey was starting to feel trapped.  It had been almost two hours and all he got accomplished was soup. "I'm going to go. Maybe I can stall. Shit. It would all be so much easier if you would let me take you to a hospital.

"No hospitals," Will said. It was an automatic response by now and he didn't even look up.

"Don't let anyone in and if someone tries to come in, call the police."

"If I call the police they'll send me to the hospital. I would rather...face whatever we're running from." Will's eyes  were very clear when he met Jeffrey's. "Who _are_ we running from?"

There was a knock at the door.

"Jeffrey? Will?"

Neither of them answered. The tapping continued, light but insistent.

"I know you're there. There's a car out front. Will, let me in."

Will shouldered past Jeffrey and opened the door.

"Wait!" Jeffrey said, but it was too late. Will opened the door for Hannibal.

"Jeffrey, go home. Will, get in my car. We are all leaving."

"No," Jeffrey said.

"We just got here. I haven't finished my soup," Will protested, but he was pulling on the rubber boots.

"We can have soup at home. Please go wait in the car."

Jeffrey grabbed Hannibal's arm. "What are you doing?"

Hannibal made sure Will had left the house. "I'm going to take him to the hospital."

"You're going to take him to the basement!"

Hannibal glanced down at where Jeffrey's grasp had tightened on his arm. He looked faintly amused.

"You have my word. I'm going to bring him to a hospital. Now go home."

 

Jeffrey thought about driving north instead of east back to Baltimore. He wasn't sure that would do any good.

He trusted Hannibal. (If he said he was bringing Will to the hospital he would.)

He adored Hannibal. (With Will gone, maybe they could go back to the way it had been before him. It was a selfish thought, but he couldn't help it after seeing all the chaos.)

And he feared Hannibal. (If he was angry with Jeffrey, running away would do nothing. He couldn't wait Hannibal out. He had a long memory and unnatural patience.)

So, Jeffrey drove home.

 

Back at the house, Jeffrey went in the green room. He had never gone in Will's room before because he never had a reason to, although he was pretty sure the IV stand hadn't been an original part of the décor. The room was neat, but small details gave him the chills. There were amber pill bottles on the nightstand. None of them had labels. There was no glass in the picture frames on the wall. The doorknob had been turned around so it locked from the outside. There were fingernail gouges in the wall next to the door.  Will's nails being cut short made sense now. The marks were low on the wall. Whoever made them had been kneeling, not standing.

Jeffrey got a suitcase from the hallway closet and put it down on the bed. The process of packing, like making the soup, gave him focus and something practical to do with his hands. He packed shirt and pants, pajamas, a few crisp white tee-shirts, and, with a short mental apology in advance to Will, underwear.

"What are you doing? "

Hannibal had come in the door and down the hall silently, in his effortless cat-like way. "Are you are so keen to get Will out of my life?" He walked over and touched the collar of the shirt Jeffrey had just packed so neatly. "I understand. I feel that way too. I want to put the evidence of my failure behind me, but its too soon. How else will I learn if I don't take time to contemplate my failures?"

"I wasn't trying to blot out his memory from human history,"  Jeffrey said. "I was just packing him a suitcase."

"Where he is they won't let him have it."

"Are you angry with me?"

Hannibal sat on the bed next to the suitcase. "I'm angry at myself. I let this go on too long. I thought if I could break him the right way, I could put him together better than new. But the pieces fell through my fingers and I didn't want to admit it. Seeing his deterioration through your eyes has been shocking.  I was wrong. I had to scrap it. The whole plan."

"What did you do to him?"

"Nothing. He's in the hospital now. They'll treat him, but he'll be in a bit of trouble when he awakes, for killing those girls."

"He didn't really kill people, did he?"

"They'll think he did. There is abundant evidence for it."

"Did you have to destroy his life?"

"What would you have me do, Jeffrey? Drop him on the side of the road and hope he didn't find his way home? Or should I have put him out of his misery?" Hannibal said. "I left him alive. A token of how much I cared for him."

"I don't know if he'll see it that way."

"Not at first. Hopefully, some day." A tear slipped down his cheek. "Will was…unsuitable." Saying the words caused him obvious pain. "He wasn't what I wanted him to be. I'm sorry, Jeffrey. I risked the safety of the life we have on a pipe dream."

Jeffrey held out his arms and Hannibal went into them.

Often, when Jeffrey saw Hannibal from across the room, shoulders back, head held high and solid as an oak chest of drawers, it was hard to remember he could be like this, molding himself to Jeffrey's contours, the edges of his shoulder blades like folded wings, small enough for Jeffrey to hold. One anesthetized part of his brain insisted that this was the real version of Hannibal. He was small and fragile and needed protecting. The greater part of himself knew none of that was true.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I'm back to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for my chapter titles
> 
> And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!  
> Smoothed by long fingers,  
> Asleep...tired...or it maligners,  
> Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.  
> Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,  
> Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?  
> But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,  
> Though I have seem my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,  
> I am no prophet- and here's no great matter;  
> I have seem the moment of my greatness flicker,  
> And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,  
> And in short, I was afraid.


	14. So Sweet and So Cold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That corpse you planted last year in your garden,  
> 'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?  
> 'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?  
> 'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,  
> 'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!  
> 'You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!'   
> (You! Hypocrite reader—my doppleganger—my brother!")  
>  (From The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot)

Jack was escorted into the BSHCI visiting room by no one less that the director himself.

"You're lucky he agreed to see you," Chilton said. "He doesn't usually accept visitors." His voice was barbed with sarcasm.

Will looked better than he had at the hospital, but he still had a sickly pallor that wasn't helped by the sad shade of blue-green he had to wear.

The chain was long enough for his cuffed hands to rest in his lap.

"You aren't helping your defense any," Jack said without preamble.

"I don't have a defense, Jack.  I'm guilty," he shrugged, with a grim resigned smile on his face. "I have to be. The evidence is compelling and damn near irrefutable."

"But you don't remember."

"There's a lot that I don't remember. No matter what my lawyer tries to argue, memory loss is no excuse," Will said. "I can't trust myself. My opinion has been compromised. The evidence says I did it, and Hannibal thinks I did it. He knows me better than I know myself right now."

 "Did he tell you that directly?" Jack asked. "What were his exact words?"

"He hasn't spoken to me except by his silence. If he thought I was innocent, he would be here to support me. If he's lost confidence in me then I have no basis for self-confidence." The chains clanked softly as Will leaned forward in his seat.

"I regret dragging him down into this," he said. "If you see him, can you tell him I said that?"

 

"Will asked after you," Jack said. "It would cheer him up if you stopped by, said hello."

"Did you call me to remind me of my obligations to a former patient?"

Jack tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. He was trying the honey first and waiting on the vinegar if he needed it. "He thinks he's guilty. And he thinks _you_ think he's guilty."  He shifted the phone to his other ear. "I don't think he is. I can't explain it, but maybe you can," he said.  "If you don't want to go see him, come down to the office to see me. Convince me of your point of view."

"I don't think I will be doing that," Hannibal's voice was crisp and businesslike. "There's only one topic on the table and it is one I'm not willing to discuss. Anything you want to know, including my assessment of Will's mental state and his capability for violence would be covered by doctor-patient confidentiality."

"Hiding under that umbrella might not be the best tactic," Jack said.  "There's a lot that will be revealed at Will's trial. There will be fallout. Especially for doctors who cross boundaries with their patients."

"There will be a wide circle of fallout if everything gets dragged into the light. You and I were the angel and devil on Will's shoulder, Jack, pulling him this way and that until he was dizzy. We both have to acknowledge our part in Will's current situation."

"Doesn't everyone have to take responsibility for their own actions?" Jack asked.

"That's a convenient way to absolve oneself of guilt. The whispering apparitions can disappear in a puff of smoke, claiming their nonexistence puts them above mortal law."

"So which one of us is the angel and which one is the devil?" Jack asked.

"It depends on what moral law you ascribe to. I only ever wanted Will to be his best self. You used him for what you judged to be the better good with a disregard for what it did to him. How many killers Will caught is unimportant to me," Hannibal said. "But none of this ethical parsing is my job. I'm not an officer of the law. It isn't my position to be the accuser."

Jack steamed silently.

"I think I've said all I intend to. Anything else you want to discuss with me will go through my attorneys."

 

Hannibal hung up the phone and felt invigorated. A quick sparring session with Jack Crawford was just what he needed. Drinking in Jack's state of mind was like a tonic, bitter and bracing.

His garden had been patiently waiting on his malaise to lift and it badly needed pruning. It suited Hannibal's mood to wield the heavy shears and do some cutting back. Everything he needed was outside in the small shed he kept as organized as his basement. The right tool for the right job, always at hand. He wore, without irony, a large hat to garden in. Like his gloves and gardening tools, they never saw the inside of the house.

"It was such a lovely day, but warm," he said, when he came back in after an hour or so of his semi-manual labor. It was early in the year yet, but one of his lettuces has already bolted. It oozed milky sap and when he tasted a leaf it was bitter. That one, he had pulled up by the roots.

He had cut back the lilacs and hyacinth a little too much, but they would survive it.

Jeffrey poured and passed him a glass of water, which he drank gratefully. He put his cheek against Hannibal's shoulder feeling the sun-warmed cotton. His neck had a flushed heat, the hairs at the nape of his neck spiky with damp.

"I'm filthy," Hannibal said.

"Oh, I know."

He smelled like sweat and good rich soil and something green and sharply vegetal.

"Were you pruning the tomato plants?

"Well deduced. Hungry?"

"Don't go to any trouble."

Hannibal brought out a tray of things that could be eaten simply and with the hands; fruit, bread and cheese. The only utensil they needed was a knife.

"Look what I found," Hannibal said, taking one last item from the refrigerator. "Its one of those plums we had the other day. It perfectly ripe, almost over-ripe. Tomorrow it will be spoiled."

"We can share," Jeffrey said, taking it. Hannibal was right, the fruit had the perfect  amount of give in his hand.

"No it's all for you. I know how much you like them. Eat the whole thing."

Hannibal cut a pear into wedges, sliding it into his mouth straight from the blade.

"How is your pear?" Jeffrey asked, biting into the golden fruit.

"Could be riper."

Jeffrey sucked the juice from the side of his hand.

"You are in a better mood than I've seen in weeks. Outside, working up a sweat," Jeffrey said. "It isn't what I was expecting. Will's trial starts Monday. You may have to testify."

"I was dreading his trial and now its almost here," Hannibal said "I can't stop it. There's a certain relief to that. And its another step towards our lives being back on track."

"Are your activities going to be back on track?"

"If you are asking about the Ripper, I think he will retire soon. I have other plans. I'm making great strides with Abigail. She might be the one. I quite like the idea of being a father."

"You surprise me."

"By wanting to be a father?"

"For wanting to try again so soon."

Hannibal set down the knife. "I wanted to learn from my mistakes and I have," he said. "I have learned not to mix business with pleasure."

Hannibal saw the passing shadow on Jeffrey's face. He was thinking about Will. He had enough mental pictures to overwhelm his formidable emotional defenses with sheer volume. Hannibal put his hand on Jeffrey's.

 "Thinking about parenthood is making me feel nostalgic," Hannibal said.  "Let's go have a smoke in your room, then I can clean up and we can see what the rest of the day holds for us."

Jeffrey occasionally liked to have a cigarette, which he smoked only in his room with the door shut, blowing the smoke out the window. Hannibal never joined him, but didn't protest either. Now they sat together on the window seat with the window cracked open an inch. Jeffrey lit Hannibal's cigarette and then his own. He knew Hannibal was trying to distract him. It was working.

"You should wear your diamond earring," Jeffrey said, "to complete the whole nostalgic picture."

Hannibal didn't have it anymore. He had, one night, in a fit of romanticism, put in in Will's navel as he slept. It was probably in the closed-off green room, but it was as inaccessible as if it had been hurled into a chasm.

"I wish I still had that jacket I wore back then," Hannibal said. "The leather was so supple it was like wearing a second skin."

"What happened to it?"

"I sold it. There was a time where I sold anything I had worth selling."

The original diamond earring had been sold too. Hannibal had kept it nearly for last because it sent a message. People saw a young man, cocky, wearing an earring, and they made assumptions. Once someone thought they knew what they were dealing with, it was so much easier to deal with them. It was a principle he still used.

Jeffrey had been the one to replace the original earring in a fit of his own romanticism.

"I wish I could have taken care of you back then," Jeffrey said.

"I wasn't tame enough to be kept."

Hannibal kept the cigarette going as he took off his shirt, transferring it from his lips to his fingers, making it look like an effortless sleight of hand trick. Jeffrey's cigarette burned, forgotten, between his fingers. Hannibal leaned against the sill, blowing smoke outside and then flicked the filter nub out the window.

Jeffrey turned to the place where he kept his stash of cigarettes in a lacquer box.

"Should I get you another?"

 

Because Hannibal still loved him in his way, the end was merciful when it came for Jeffrey. Hannibal loved him as well as he could love a human and that was good enough for longer than he had expected. They had had a good run, Hannibal thought.

Neither of them had counted on Hannibal someday meeting another creature with dark pits for eyes and a taste for blood.  It hadn't been anything Jeffrey had done or had not done. He had been a nearly perfect human companion; rich and indulgent, smart enough to be interesting, willing to be blind when it was convenient. Jeffrey's charm had been another screen between Hannibal and the world.  But he was, after all, only human, and humans have their limits.

 Jack Crawford, looking at the crime scene later, would have his doubts about whether this was a Ripper killing or not. The victim had not been tortured alive, but had his neck quickly snapped. The staging afterward was pure Ripper theatrics, but he had never known the Ripper to show anything approaching mercy.

It was merciful. Hannibal flicked his cigarette out the window, and when Jeffrey turned away, he moved quickly. Jeffrey didn't even have time to feel fear. He felt Hannibal pressing up behind him and in that split second, welcomed the familiar body on his. Hannibal had so imbued him with nostalgia and he was thinking about what was, without considering the here and now.

After Hannibal snapped his neck, he eased Jeffrey to the floor gently, undressed him tenderly and then carried him into the shower instead of going directly downstairs. There was a slop sink in the basement with an attached hose and that was usually good enough for cleaning up his victims, but Jeffrey deserved better.

Sitting on the floor of the shower, he leaned Jeffrey back against him, between his bent legs. His head was resting on Hannibal's chest. He methodically washed Jeffrey from head to toe. His face showed no sign of mourning, but he went through the washing ritual deliberate and unhurried.

When he was finished, he wrapped Jeffrey around the waist in a white towel he took from a sealed bag. The towel was rough white cotton of the kind found in almost every hotel in the world, and therefore, nearly untraceable.

He dressed himself and then scooped up Jeffrey from the floor. When his head lolled, Hannibal pressed it against his chest and shifted his weight. In the basement workroom, which he had outfitted much like an autopsy suite in stainless steel and white tile, he spread Jeffrey out on one of the tables, leaving the towel in place for modesty's sake.

"I want the eyes and the tongue," he said, brushing at the damp spot on his shirt. "God knows he didn't make enough use of them while he was living." His gaze left Jeffrey's face and traveled along his body. "What else should we have from him?"

Abigail had been standing quietly by until the question was put to her.

"His heart?"

"No. Not his heart," Hannibal said. "There can't be much left, I've been nibbling away at it for years. I'll have his kidneys, and also his liver, if it hasn't been too abused by his libertine lifestyle. I'll leave the judgment to you. You should know a healthy organ from a diseased one by now."

She smiled at his praise.

"Make the cuts as clean as you can. This one is for public consumption, so presentation counts."

 

He took out the business card. It was the oldest one in his collection, soft from handling and creased and discolored with age. He pinched it between his index and middle fingers and with a flick of the wrist sent it sailing into the fire.

 

"Did Jack send you?"

"Officially, no," Beverly said. "But he's been stamping around the office doing everything but holding the back his hand against his forehead and saying 'Oh, if only there was someone who could help me profile this crime!"

Will smiled and then stifled it when he remembered the reason for her visit.

"Do you have pictures?"

She dealt them out on the table like oversized cards.

"Three bodies, in the old observatory. Posed with two parallel and the third between them, like an uppercase I or an H."

Will considered what he saw. "Well, I don't know if this will put Jack's mind at ease or not, but this _is_ the Ripper's work."

Beverly let out the breath she had been holding. She didn't know how Jack would feel, but she was glad to not have to go back with the news of another false alarm.

"Their faces are a bloody mess," Will said.

"He took their eyes and tongues," she said. "That can get messy."

"Other injuries?"

"Organs missing on all three. Liver and kidneys. They each have a nail inserted through their hearts and navels postmortem. Don't know what that's about."

"We have IDs? Any commonality between them?"

"We've been looking into their backgrounds, but so far nothing that we can find connects them to each other. They didn't live in the same neighborhood or shop at the same grocery stores, go to the same gym."

"These might be three random victims, showing us that no one is safe." He looked at the photograph again. "Have you ID'ed the crossbar yet?" he asked. "He's the bridge between the other two. He might be significant."

 "We've ID'ed all of them but the crossbar is Jeffrey Coulton." She laid down the blown-up driver's license photo. Genial blue eyes and a sea captain's beard.  Jeffrey. Will hadn't recognized him.

 _Did I do this to you?,_ he thought. _People who know me keep getting killed. People who have connections to me. People with connections…_

Will looked back at the crime scene photo. The pose, with Jeffrey's back slightly bowed, nail sticking out of his stomach and chest reminded him of something. _Doctor, it hurts me here._

He was posed like a doctor's lady, the other two victims acting as the uprights of the "bed" he was laying on.

Will shook his head. He still wasn't working at full capacity. His brain must be misfiring. What were the chances the Ripper would want to reference a doctor's lady?

"What are these flowers strewn around them?" he asked. His gaze kept sliding away from Jeffrey.

"Hyacinth and lilac."

_They called me the hyacinth girl._

Beverly was expectant. Will had that faraway look that meant he was going wherever he needed to go and he would come back with that flash of insight that would illuminate the evidence they had. She didn't push him or hurry him.

She was giving Will the time he needed, to "reconstruct," but he didn't need to reconstruct. He needed to see what was already there and to remember. It was all there, written in the shorthand of intimacy. A secret code that couldn't be cracked by outsiders because it evolved with lives lived in tandem.

 Will had a memory return to him.

_The headaches had been getting worse. No matter how Will tried to relax—everything from guided breathing exercises to scotch, neat, did nothing to unknot the pain in his skull. None of the medicine he was given helped. He started losing time. Hours disappeared from one blink to another. In the space of a moment he would be transported from one place to another and swathes of his life were falling out like broken glass from a picture frame._

_After the two police officers brought him back from sleepwalking and had left, he was laying with his head in Hannibal's lap, burning with fever but facing the fire. He was being petted by one cool dry hand while the other hand held a book. Looking up, away from the fire he could see the olive green linen cover, the creamy fan of the pages._

_"You are floating in and out of consciousness right now," Hannibal said, "which is the perfect condition in which to hear_ The Waste Land _. I'm not convinced Eliot was fully conscious when he wrote it."_

> _"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain…"_

_Words came in and out of focus. Will remembered only pieces._ _"_ Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch," _a brief chuckle._

> _“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;“They called me the hyacinth girl.”—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  Looking into the heart of light, the silence…_
> 
> _…My nerves are bad to-night.  Yes, bad.  Stay with me..Do you know nothing?  Do you see nothing?  Do you remember 'Nothing?'   I remember those are pearls that were his eyes…"_

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins," Will said.

"What?"

He snapped his mouth shut tight. The depth went farther down than he wanted to know. He didn't kill those girls, but he knew who did. Who killed Donald Sutcliffe and so many others. He hadn't known how far down Hannibal's need went and he should have. Will had looked and looked and never seen the bottom of it because there wasn't a bottom.  It was all-consuming.

The word "consuming" rang in his head…his own voice asking _if you knew, would you eat the food?_ Memories came back of a knife being put in his hand, a fork. The utensils pressed back in his numb fingers no matter how many times he had let them fall. He wasn't to leave the table until he's finished his dinner. And when he refused to eat, he still had to sit.

 He had known, but only unlocked that knowledge when, delirious and ill, he literally had no strength left to fight it. As soon as he had an ounce of strength back, he had locked that knowledge up tight.

"He's eating them," he said to Beverly. "The missing organs aren't trophies, they are snacks."

He pushed the pictures back across the table.

"That's all I can tell you about this crime from these pictures. The Ripper picked three random victims to make a spring celebration tableaux. He's announcing the end of his winter hibernation. Lucky us."

It was a stupid, stupid lie. He should tell. It would be stupid not to tell. Jack would find out eventually. Jeffrey held the key to solving all of it. If the truth was known, Will would be freed and the Ripper would be in jail.

Hannibal, he thought. Not some stranger.   _Hannibal_ would be in jail. _Hannibal_ would be facing the death penalty.

"That's all I can tell you about this crime," Will repeated firmly.

 

When Beverly left, Will sent word to Chilton that we wanted to write a letter to his psychiatrist. Chilton approved a post card, provided he could read it first. BSHCI didn't have in-house postcards so Chilton had sent an orderly down to the nearest convenience store. The picture on the front was tourist kitsch. In huge letters it screamed "WELCOME TO BALTIMORE!"

Will wrote with the dull pencil we was allowed to use, and that only while Chilton watched.

> "It was so good to hear from you. You have broken your silence at last. Here it is never completely silent. Drip drop drip, but there is no water."

He trusted Hannibal would recognize the last sentence as a line from _The Waste Land_ and fill in the next lines himself.

> _Who is the third who walks always beside you?_
> 
> _When I count, there are only you and I together._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That line from Waste Land is German. It means "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German."
> 
> The chapter title comes from another poem  
> "This Is Just To Say"  
> by William Carlos Williams.
> 
> I have eaten/the plums/that were in/the icebox  
> and which/you were probably/saving/for breakfast  
> Forgive me/ they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold


End file.
